The Leadership Caffeine Blog
It’s That Time of Year for Managers—Don’t Make These Mistakes with Your Performance Evaluations
Even managers are prone to "Student Syndrome." It's that time of year when managers everywhere groan under the weight of the performance evaluations they've barely started. Yes, there's a similarity between college students and their assignments and managers and their...
It’s That Time of Year for Managers—Don’t Make These Mistakes with Your Performance Evaluations
The real work of getting performance evaluations starts long before you reach the time to write and discuss them. Nonetheless, you’re at the 11th hour. Here are some tips you can use at this late date to help you do your best for your team members.
Leadership is Common Sense in Action
Most of us understand the behaviors that define effective leadership. Sadly, like the behaviors that lead to physical health, we tend to do the opposite. It’s time to accept that effective leadership is common sense and cultivate a bit of discipline with our behaviors. Skip the doughnut and do the push-ups.
Leadership Caffeine™—Help Others Paint a Remarkable Picture
While we don’t stop on a daily basis to consider the long-term implications of our decisions, the best leaders understand their decisions create ripple effects in the lives and careers of others. You don’t know it at the time, but you are painting a picture…a mural trailing behind you in your decisions. If you are going to lead, make certain it’s a beautiful mural.
The Good, Hard Work of Developing Managers Who Lead
Enough with the false dichotomy between managers and leaders. Our priority must be to teach, coach, and inspire our managers to lead from day one. While those on the front-line live closer to the work of the organization, leadership behaviors are every bit as essential (maybe more so) for success as they are for those operating higher up the organization chart. Start developing your managers as leaders!
First-Time Manager #9—12 Ideas to Help You Build Better Meetings
Over a long career, few meetings are memorable. However, the cumulative pain of the many miserable, counter-productive meetings lingers long after they’ve ended. As a newer manager and an emerging leader, take the time to cultivate the habits that lead to effective meetings. Your team will thank you! Here are a dozen ideas to get you started:
New Program—Developing as a Manager of Managers
Transitioning into and navigating the role of manager of managers is one of the most important and potentially challenging career steps you will experience. My new Manager of Managers webinar series and professional development program is designed to fill the gap for practical, powerful guidance for anyone interested in succeeding in this challenging role. The program kicks off later in August, 2017, with early-bird pricing available until 8/5/2017.
Leadership Caffeine™—Real Strategy Demands Leadership Courage
Success with the work of strategy demands hard work and the irreplaceable ingredient of leadership courage. It is this courage that allows management teams and organizations to ask and answer the hard questions critical for survival and renewal.
Leadership Caffeine—Curiosity and the Leader
One of the most effective leaders I’ve worked for used his natural curiosity to infect us all with a sense of wonder, exploration and experimentation. Yet our practices in organizations today often stifle or manage curiosity out of the equation. Ironically, curiosity might just be that key ingredient required for survival and success in our era of change.
Two Strategy Tools Every Leader Must Understand
For any leader or management team struggling to navigate strategy, there are two tools I find incredibly useful in helping groups navigate complexity. They share a common trait in challenging strategy groups to focus their energy on cultivating a clear picture of a firm’s reality and then defining a way forward, before defining actions. Too many teams jump to the actions and skip the heavy lifting and deep thinking. These tools keep you honest when it comes to strategy.
Knocking the Negativity Out of Your Career and Life
“Research suggests that the human mind has a propensity to pay greater attention to and process the bad compared to the good, a phenomenon often called the negativity bias. Bad feedback has greater impact; bad impressions are quicker to form; bad information is...