The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Leadership Caffeine—Mine (and Mind) Your Mistakes for Growth
Our mistakes in pursuit of learning are the burpees, extra gym time, and leg days of our mental fitness for most of us. For those where mistakes are measured in cost or time (not life impact or safety), your mistakes measure how hard you are pushing yourself to grow....
Leadership Caffeine—Mine (and Mind) Your Mistakes for Growth
Our mistakes in pursuit of learning are the burpees, extra gym time, and leg days of our mental fitness for most of us. For those where mistakes are measured in cost or time (not life impact or safety), your mistakes measure how hard you are pushing yourself to grow. Here are ideas to turn your misfires into gold.
Leadership Caffeine™—Navigating a Truly Bad Day at the Office
A good friend and leadership mentor once offered: “you know it’s a bad day at the office when your deodorant fails by 10:30 in the morning.” Here are some thoughts on keeping it together during the really bad leadership and management days you’ll inevitably encounter:
The Feedback Series, Part 4—Opening the Discussion
Most feedback discussions succeed or fail in the opening sentence. You have a chance to engage the receiver and build value or, point a finger and make the discussion feel like an indictment. Here are 6 suggestions to help you get the feedback discussion started on the right footing:
Leadership Caffeine™—Ten Annoying Habits that Irk Your Employees
Last week, I spent some time in a post offering guidance on strengthening your performance as an employee. This week, our focus returns to the individual at the top of the food chain. If this happens to be you, your team will thank you for spending a few minutes perusing the list below and kindly stomping these bad habits out of existence.
It’s Your Career—A Guide to Becoming a Better Employee
It’sYourCareerWhile guidance on developing as a leader is plentiful…perhaps in over abundance, there’s relatively little in the daily flow of business and management writing devoted to developing as an effective employee. For just a few minutes, let’s turn the world of leadership and management advice upside down and take on the perspective of the boss and what she’s looking for from you as a member of her team. Here are 10 things the boss is looking for from effective employees:
Leadership Caffeine™—Experiment More and Prosper
In many environments, it seems that we’ve routinized creativity in leading and managing key activities and developing talent right into oblivion. It’s death (or at least plodding slow performance) by routine.
Just One Thing—Leader: To Thine Own Self Be True
I was struck by the simplicity and power of an observation from one of the (early career) participants in a recent leadership program of mine. After studying different styles and approaches and examples of leaders, he indicated that he was walking away from the program with a sense that there was no one style he was required to emulate on his path to leadership success.
New Leader Tuesday—The Feedback Series, Part 3: The Ingredients
Welcome to part 3 of The Feedback Series at Management Excellence. In part 1, we tackled the issues of fear and anxiety that keeps so many new leaders from engaging in or conducting effective feedback discussions. Part 2 emphasized the importance of assessing the feedback situation and establishing a direction for the upcoming discussion. Now, it’s time to understand and begin assembling the key ingredients in every feedback discussion.
Leadership Caffeine™—How Effective Leaders Use the Personal Pronoun “I”
Few words in the leader’s lexicon are simultaneously as powerful for building credibility and as potentially lethal for destroying credibility as the personal pronoun “I.” It works great in front of any statement where you are taking responsibility for actions or outcomes. However, place too many “I’s” in conversations that sound like, I want, I expect, I know, I did, I was right etc…and the term begins to jump out into the immediate environment with a loud bang every time it’s uttered.
New Leader Tuesday—The Feedback Series, Part 2: Classifying the Feedback Situation
While feedback is best served warm (as close to the behavioral occurrence as possible), a few quality minutes of proper preparation will dramatically improve both your confidence for engaging in the discussion and your ability to conduct a high quality discussion. An important first step after observing the positive or negative behavior is to develop an understanding of the nature of the situation and to assess the right approach to support the behavioral improvement.