The Leadership Caffeine Blog
A Six-Stage Process to De-Risk Your Career Shift
It's the fear that keeps us from moving from daydreams into action It's always the fear of something that holds us back when it comes to a career change. I hear the "What if's?" from clients at the beginning of our work together all of the time. Just a few I...
A Six-Stage Process to De-Risk Your Career Shift
So many people I encounter are interested in making a career shift, but struggle to get started. And, they worry about the risks involved in the process. Here’s a six-stage process to de-risk your career shift.
Coming Attractions at the Management Excellence Blog
There’s a lot of new and a fair amount of new and improved coming soon at the Management Excellence blog. From the return of the Leadership Caffeine podcast to the new and improved Leadership Caffeine e-News, the Holiday Book List and the 2016 Coaching Calls Series, I’m excited to support your professional development efforts with all of these vehicles!
Leadership Caffeine™—Are You Driving Your Team Bananas?
What I really wanted to call this post was, “Quit Acting Like a Hyper-Rooster.” It’s much more visual, and after all, does anyone really want to look or act like a hyper-rooster? Yet, that’s exactly what too many managers act and look like, as they simultaneously strut and flit around the office or plant, moving from activity to activity, focusing on everything and nothing and making their colleagues dizzy and disoriented in the process.
Leadership Caffeine™—Giving Thanks for Those Who Taught Us Grit
Grit is a good word. It’s an even better trait. You know what grit is when you see it. It’s that grind-it-out sticktoitiveness in the face of adversity displayed by individuals long on character and short on “I can’t.” Here are some of my most inspiring examples of grit:
Just One Thing—The Hard Work of Pivoting To Purpose
Whether it’s a life-stage issue or a sign of the times, I seem to regularly run into individuals who are active in pursuit of vocations that focus on helping others. They are pivoting to purpose.
6 Reasons Why We Should Apply Game Design Approaches to Designing Workplaces
Imagine a world of work where your colleagues worked tirelessly to complete the hard work that keeps everything moving. They voluntarily stay late and even deprive themselves of sleep to ensure the work is done. Along the way, they collaborate at a moment’s notice to fend off enemies and slay the dragons that arise from unexpected locations, and they’re always working on their own skills development. Sound like fiction to you? Rather than fictional, perhaps it’s virtual—as in gaming. Yes, video gaming.
Art of Managing—Beware Lazy Approaches to the Hard Work of Strategy
“Not miscalculation, bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy.” Richard Rumelt—Good Strategy/Bad Strategy Consider: “Our strategy is to be more profitable than our competitors.” “Our strategy is to grow from 10,000 to 100,000...
Leadership Caffeine™—Seeing and Observing
We spend an incredible amount of time immersed in a world of our own fabrication—the world as it feels and looks and acts from inside our organization’s walls. It’s not the culture that will kill you, it’s the view. It’s time to change it. Take off the blinders and look up and out further. Extend your focal point.
Just One Thing—Think Big(ger)
I confess to having cultivated a strong affinity for Big Thinkers in my advancing years as an executive. The flip-side of this growing affinity is my creeping impatience and dismissal of small thinkers. Given the scale and scope of the challenges in our world and in our industries and firms, small thinkers are a drag on the drive to change. And yes, life and our careers are too short to think small.
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: