The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Challenging Conversation Sound Bite #1—Design Your Challenging Conversations for Success
Note from Art: more than half of my time on emerging and senior leader coaching calls is invested in the topic of challenging conversations. I’m kicking off this weekly Sound Bytes series (of less than 500 words) to share tips and approaches to help you create value...
Challenging Conversation Sound Bite #1—Design Your Challenging Conversations for Success
During my coaching calls with leaders at all levels, much of our time is invested in how to engage and structure the conversations to uncover value for all parties. Here are some tips to help you pre-think and design your discussions to achieve successful outcomes for all parties.
Leadership Caffeine™—Your Job is to Clear the Path
The best gift you can provide to your team members is the gift of time. If you’ve got the right team members (with the right values), they’ll respond to your willingness to clear the path with enthusiasm, creativity and commitment. Here are 5 diagnostic questions to help remind you of your need to clear the path ahead for your team members:
Congratulations on the MBA! Now What? Some Key Do’s and Don’ts
All over the U.S., there’s a fresh new crop of MBA candidates preparing to say goodbye to their classmates as they wrap up what will be for many, the final phase of their academic careers. A key question on their minds is, “What’s next?” Here are 10 key Do’s and Don’ts for the newly minted MBA:
Just One Thing—Learn to Recognize Your Strengths
To the extent that we struggle to see our own weaknesses, we are remarkably naïve and blind to our strengths. This gap in our own view-of-self is in my experience more detrimental to career success and personal-professional satisfaction than the issues surrounding our alleged weaknesses. Here are at least 4 barriers that get in the way of seeing our own strengths:
Leadership Caffeine™—What to Do When the Mistakes Don’t Go Away
Mistakes in the workplace are inevitable. After all, we’re human, and try as we might to operate error free, our own software is far from perfect and we occasionally let one slip through the filters. In some circumstances, mistakes are a healthy part of the learning process. In others, they’re a sign that is something wrong on the personal front and you need to step in and offer help. And in other circumstances, they’re a sign that you’re not doing your job as a manager to maintain appropriate quality and accountability standards.
Just One Thing—Prosper by Making Time Every Day to Just Think
If your typical day resembles the one that most of us experience in the corporate environment, it’s a series of meetings interspersed with a series of transactional exchanges that might be better described as interruptions. There’s little of that elusive and precious asset called “quality time” on our calendars or in our days…and in reality, much of our daily lives are filled with what has been been described as “unproductive busyness. Here’s a reminder to create the downtime our brains and bodies need to recharge and place things in proper context.
Just One Thing—Is it Time to Suspend Your Judgment in Hiring?
There’s an interesting article in the May, 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review, entitled, “In Hiring, Algorithms Beat Instinct.” According to the authors, we would be better served by letting algorithms do the heavy lifting before inserting our own bias-filled and easily distracted selves into the hiring equation. Provocative, yes, but I’m not convinced that it’s time to defer judgment to a test instrument. Here’s why…
Why Workplace Teams Struggle—And What to Do About It
Many workplace teams I observe are not much better than the typical nightmarish college class group project that most of us have lived through at one time or another. Here are 4 big reasons why workplace teams struggle and 9 ideas to help you do something about it:
Art of Managing—Sometimes You Have to Slow Down to Go Faster
Today’s management literature is filled with references to speed. If we’re following the trends, we’re all growing more “agile” and likely “lean” in the process. We’re working in “sprints” and “bursts,” and of course, we’re “teaming” whenever possible. All of this motion may be helping our waistlines, dancing moves and cardio health, but I’m not convinced that speed is always the right answer. Sometimes you just have to slow down to go faster.
Here are 4 key situations where pausing before acting makes good business sense:
Art of Managing—Shiny Objects and the Senior Management Team
One of the value killers found inside many organizations is the out of control pursuit of too many new initiatives. The root cause of this undisciplined pursuit of new initiatives rests squarely on the collective shoulders of the management team.