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.
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.
On the Contrary—Beware the Lure of Bad Conventional Wisdom
There’s an awful lot of conventional wisdom that is nothing more than a cover for organizational and managerial laziness. It pays to cultivate an allergic reaction to anything that smells like: “We’ve always done it this way.”
Commanding Excellence with Gary Morton: Purpose, Obsession, and Creativity
Gary Morton, author of Commanding Excellence: Inspiring Purpose, Passion, and Ingenuity through Leadership that Matters, shares his wisdom and experiences in this wide-ranging interview with Management Excellence and Leadership Caffeine author, Art Petty.
How to Survive A Career Panic Attack at Mid-Life
There are a number of reasons individuals become insecure over their careers and futures in our world of uncertainty and change. In some cases, the insecurity manifests in a full blown career panic attack. While complicated, there are steps all of us can take to get up off the couch and start moving beyond the career panic attack.
4 Key Starter Ingredients for Successful Strategy Execution
Even a sound strategy process that effectively characterizes the situation and way forward still faces considerable risk in the form of strategy execution. Ultimately, the ideas are relatively easy. It’s the work of bringing strategy to life that is difficult. Here are 4 key ingredients you require for successful strategy execution.