The Leadership Caffeine Blog
My Summer 2023 Professional Reading List
My friend Wally Bock publishes a reminder every year for us to make our summer reading lists. That's my cue to build and share mine. I suspect a few of these professional development reads might trickle over onto my into my fall reading; however, it's good to have an...
My Summer 2023 Professional Reading List
Here are my top choices for my personal Summer 2023 Professional Reading list.
Struggling as a Manager? Try Revisiting These 3 Foundational Issues
If you’re growing frustrated and fatigued with your life as a manager, you might want to take a step-back and review and strengthen the foundation for your role. Three items provide structural integrity for your managerial foundation: role clarity, values, and connectedness
All three components inter-operate to support your effectiveness and to eliminate many challenges in this difficult role. Alternatively, the absence of the three is potentially disastrous.
Leadership Caffeine™—Communication Lessons from Charlie Brown
How confident are you that your message is getting through to others? Too often we perceive we are communicating clearly and effectively, when all anyone hears is something resembling the adults on a Charlie Brown feature. You know the noise they make: “Wah wa wa wa wah wa.” Don’t let this be you.
4 Big Career Mistakes of Otherwise Smart People
It turns out, just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you make good career choices. Some of the smartest people I know keep tripping all over themselves as they stumble from one bad situation to the next. They fall victim to at least 4 big career mistakes. That’s too...
4 Big Obstacles in the Way of Organizational Transformation
F. Scott Fitzgerald offered, “There are no second acts,” and mostly, this holds true for our organizations. What’s good or great one day often succumbs to market forces and disruptions. Organizational transformation on a large scale is a difficult act, yet some do succeed. In this first in a series of articles, I offer my perspective on at least 4 of the big obstacles that get in the way of success.
For Better Decision-Making, Unpack and Stress Test Assumptions
There are many reasons our seemingly failure-proof plans go horribly wrong. One critical step you can take to move the odds of success in the right direction is to borrow a step from Red Teaming and learn to unpack and stress test key assumptions. This article shares some ideas to help you get started with this critical step for strengthening decision-making and planning activities.
Leadership Caffeine™—Improving the Fitness of Your Cross-Functional Teams
Cross-functional teams are a fact of life in our organizations. As a team or initiative leader, you are competing with a host of other priorities and initiatives for the hearts and minds of your team members. Your group’s performance depends upon you taking steps early in the team formation to ensure a healthy, effective working environment. Here are five ideas to help you jump-start your cross-functional team’s health:
Curious About How to Attack Your Career Reinvention? Free Webinar
Join me for a free webinar where I share lessons learned and ideas for you as you pursue your own journey of career reinvention. I lived this journey myself and now I work with later career professionals interested in pivoting to something different and more important and personally rewarding in their lives.
Quit Fooling Yourself—You Have Groups Not Teams
In most workplaces, we operate with loosely coordinated groups and not teams in the true sense. These groups lack purpose, coaching, structure, support, and leadership, and as a result, sub-optimize. Fortunately, the ingredients and recipe for effective team development are not locked away somewhere in a vault. Mostly, they are basic blocking and tackling.
First-Time Manager #13—The Importance of Clear Communication Values
Communication challenges are a fact of workplace life, however, establishing clear communication values can simplify and improve a team’s effectiveness and efficiency with this mission critical behavior.