Wake-Up Calls for Managers
For the hard parts no one prepares you for
When the path isn’t clear, the stakes are high, and the answers aren’t obvious—this is where managers struggle most.
Wake-Up Calls for Managers delivers practical, real-world guidance for navigating:
- Tough conversations
- Leading through uncertainty
- Building influence without authority
- Driving results through others
The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Why you need to start treating your words like Lego Blocks
Bottom-Line Up-Front: Words are what we have to inspire, motivate, clarify, empower, and enable. Yet, too often, our words work against us and create problems. Start thinking about words as building blocks of great conversations. They're like Legos, and you can...
Why you need to start treating your words like Lego Blocks
Words are what we have to inspire, motivate, clarify, empower, and enable. Yet, too often, our words work against us and create problems. Why you need to start treating your words like Legos.
Leadership Caffeine™—Your Curiosity is Contagious
Too many managers and organizational leaders emphasize answers and directives over questions. You are leaving performance and innovation on the table if you do this. Instead, know that your curiosity is contagious and start leading with open-ended, thought-provoking questions.
When Slowing Down Helps You Move Faster with Strategy
You’ll rarely meet a CEO or top executive suggesting, “What we need to do is slow down.” This counter-intuitive guidance in a world seemingly spinning faster-and-faster flies in the face of conventional thinking and practice, yet in matters of strategy, slowing down to move faster, is often the recipe for success
Leadership Caffeine™—Ten Essential Behaviors for Emerging Leaders
While some leadership behaviors are timeless, the context in which we lead is ever-changing. Here are ten leadership behaviors for emerging leaders in our era of volatility and uncertainty.
It’s Not Science Fiction—How an Idea Lab Might Just Create an Alternate Timeline for Your Firm
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. Ideas are the engines of innovation, yet too often they are visible for just a flash of time. In reality, we need ways to curate and develop ideas. Try building an idea lab. All you need to get started is a few spare walls, some low-cost materials and some starter ideas! Just be careful, as you may very well change your firm’s future in the process.
How Integrative Thinking Promotes Innovative Problem-Solving
Integrative thinking is the process of using the tension from two conflicting approaches to a problem in pursuit of a new and innovative outcome. Instead of responding to competitive or strategic situations with the same approaches, try these 5 tools to identify new and superior approaches.
Career Reinvention May Save Your Health and Life
We all intuitively know a toxic workplace is bad for our health. Jeffrey Pfeffer’s latest book, Dying for a Paycheck, offers some data to back this claim. And while some may benefit from job change, others are motivated to reinvent their careers as part of saving their health and lives. This articles shares some of the insights gained in working with multiple career reinventors.
Your Open Door Policy Needs to Be Closed for Good
While the intent of the statement, “I’ve got an open door policy” is mostly positive, it’s naive and out of time and sync in a world where managers are accountable for closing the power gap between themselves and their group members. Get up and get out and narrow the power gap while doing some good.
Few Do-Overs in Leadership, Instead, Do-Different
Unfortunately, do-overs in leadership are rare. Instead, work on rebuilding your leadership foundation mid-flight by using these three big ideas with your team.
Harnessing the Benefits of Physical Transformation for Career Reinvention
There’s a well-known mind-body connection when it comes to exercise. The hard work of career reinvention is helped considerably when you commit to a parallel activity of physical transformation