The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Hope Proved to Be a Bad Strategy for LUV—Lessons from the Southwest Airlines Debacle
Southwest Airlines, Long a B-School Favorite For a couple of decades, Southwest Airlines was the business school case study of excellent management and people-focused leadership backed by brand-loyal customers who regularly sang the praises of this low-cost carrier....
Hope Proved to Be a Bad Strategy for LUV—Lessons from the Southwest Airlines Debacle
There are some painful and painfully obvious leadership and management lessons from the recent Southwest Airlines debacle. Deming is spinning in his grave over this one.
Assessing Power and Politics in Your Organization
Much of the writing about leadership leaves out two of the most critical topics: power and politics. That’s a problem, because the political environment defines the playing field and those with the power dominate the organization’s agenda. Ignoring these facts of organizational life is a formula for futility. Here’s a checklist of 10 questions to get you started on forming a better picture of your firm’s political environment:
Leadership Caffeine™—The Power of Simple Gestures
There are literally dozens of opportunities every day for you to make a difference. From the fundamental act of paying focused attention to a coworker, to offering a personal morning greeting or engaging in the acts of management such as: providing encouragement or delivering respectful, constructive feedback, these simple gestures have a big impact on the people and environment.
Just One Thing—The Future of Work Now Arriving
From radically changing business models to rampant creative destruction driven by digitization and globalization to a world where ideas are the primary form of capital and the purveyors of ideas move freely through this friction-free environment (think: gig economy), this emerging world of work and career has little resemblance to the one of even a mere decade-ago.
High Performance Management—All Strategy Work is Personal
Most businesses and most management teams flail and fail when it comes to the work of strategy. In today’s world, where the long-cycle strategy process has been replaced by short-bursts of experimentation and iteration, it’s essential to reduce the fail and flail by attacking the root causes of so much dysfunction with this work. Here are 7-Steps to to help the senior team get it right:
New Leader Tuesday—You’ve Got to Get Your Hands Dirty
The best leaders quickly learn that the difficult messy tasks are the difference-makers. They seek training and coaching and they practice these tasks over and over again in pursuit of competence.
Leadership Caffeine™—Navigating Overload, Ambiguity and Conflict
Harvard Business School Professor, Linda Hill’s, description of context faced by everyone in a leadership role in this era: “overload, ambiguity and conflict” is spot on. It is a much more articulate labeling of what I describe as, “the leadership blender.” And it reflects the state of existence of a large percentage of leaders as they strive to do more with less, faster, and with more impact. You could not ask for three more challenging contextual sets of circumstances. Here are some thoughts in developing your “inner game of leading” to help you survive and thrive in this era of change:
The Next Act—Pivot to Focus on Your Superpower
In the dozens of discussions I’ve held with 50-somethings on this Next Act career topic, I can literally count on one hand the number of individuals who expressed satisfaction with their work. It seems that after several decades of hard work, people are growing tired of the corporate grind. The most common answer to, “What’s next?” has been, “retirement” and, “play more golf.” If chasing a little white ball around a lawn doesn’t do it for you, it’s time to focus on making the pivot from where you are at to something that leverages your superpower.
How Small-Company CEOs Can Build Management Teams that Work
One of the worst uses of the term, “team,” is in relationship to the group of executives who report to the CEO. For many of the (less than $200 million in annual revenue) firms I work with, there’s little beyond the “report to” issue that binds these groups together as a team. This is often frustrating to CEOs who expect more from their highest paid lieutenants. Here are 3 areas where these groups can and must coalesce as a team:
Art of Managing—Bad Boss? Are You Sure it’s Not You?
Just about everyone I’ve encountered recently—or so it seems—has an ax or two to grind with their boss. Have you ever stopped to consider whether it’s you and not your manager? Just in case it hasn’t occurred to you, perhaps a bit of mirror gazing is in order. If you see yourself on this list of, “The Boss’s Top Ten Challenging People,” it might be time for you to make some adjustments. Of course, first, you have to see yourself.