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
Feeling Invisible at Work? It’s Time for Action
Bottom Line Up Front If you've been passed over for promotion opportunities or you find yourself relegated to less-than-strategic initiatives in your organization, that creeping sense of irrelevance you are feeling might be real. As the late Andy Grove offered, "Only...
Feeling Invisible at Work? It’s Time for Action
If you’ve been passed over for promotion opportunities or you find yourself relegated to less-than-strategic initiatives in your organization, that creeping sense of irrelevance you are feeling might be real. As the late Andy Grove offered, “Only the paranoid survive.” Let’s channel this paranoia into some focused actions to regain your relevance.
Leadership Power-Up #1—Pay it Forward
A Leadership Power-Up is a positive action you take to strengthen your energy, enthusiasm, and resolve for the hard work of guiding and developing others while driving results. This new series share simple, powerful approaches for powering up your performance as a manager and leader.
First-Time Manager #14—Management Lessons Learned the Hard Way
In workshops and live settings, I’ve been asked numerous times about my biggest mistakes as a manager. I’ve made a fair number of them over three decades of leading and managing (and I regularly share these via my cases and articles), however, my Achilles Heel earlier...
Leadership Caffeine™—Be the Hero of Your Own Story
Being the hero of your own leadership and management journey isn’t about focusing on yourself. To the contrary, it’s about focusing on those around you and striving to leave every encounter, situation, and person a bit better than how you found it. Here are 4 questions to use daily to strengthen results on your own heroic journey:
Moving Beyond a Plateau— 9 Lessons in Career Reinvention
Getting started on the hard, important work of reinventing your career is a challenging proposition. Here are 9 lessons I’ve learned from working with some great professionals on this process, along with some ideas for you to consider.
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.