The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Six Big Insights from the Six-Hour Career Energize Program Beta Sessions
Great Things Happen When You Get A Dozen Professionals Together to Talk about Career Change For two Saturday sessions (3 hours each) in April, I had the pleasure of facilitating a dozen great professionals through the beta version of my Six-Hour Career Energize...
Six Big Insights from the Six-Hour Career Energize Program Beta Sessions
Six big insights from the recent beta version of the Six-Hour Career Energize Program. It turns out there is a process for turning daydreams into reality without jumping off a cliff.
Leadership Caffeine™—Exploring Breakaway Leadership, Part 1
If you’ve lived through a successful migration of a business from a legacy market to a new world, you know that it’s a sometimes messy, often emotionally turbo-charged experience. Here are 8 leadership behaviors that are guaranteed to create “tripping points” for any organization or team striving to breakaway from the past:
Strategy and Category—In Pursuit of Growth
Chances are your organization has plans to “change” and as part of your strategy, you have the challenge to identify and capitalize on new sources of growth. Those concepts make for pretty slides and create head-nodding executive and boardroom presentations. Actually doing the work is as I’m sure you know, far from simple. Here are some thoughts on the challenges to move into new growth categories while fighting the gravitational pull of the past:
What the Boss Learns About You in Every Conversation
While you may not know this, that idea you bounced off of your manager the other day and your response to her questions on one of your projects both play a critical role in your near future success and the speed of growth in your paycheck! Here’s what the boss is looking and listening for when she’s talking with you:
Leadership Caffeine™: Nine Key Skills Demanded By Our Times
In our world of constant change, there are (at least) nine critical skills that leaders and professionals at all levels must cultivate to succeed:
The Rocket Scientist and the Rock Star Effect
Good ideas and good strategies are plentiful. The weight of the research on why strategies fail points at the execution side much more so than the idea side of the equation. In a career hanging around mostly technology organizations, the limiting factor has NEVER been on the idea front. It’s been on the management side and the ability of management to produce what I describe as the Rock Star Effect.
At Least 10 Managers You Don’t Want to Meet On Your Journey
Here’s a fresh follow-on to some earlier posts on the habits of lousy leaders based on input from participants in my leadership and management programs and forums. It seems we don’t run out of content for this thread!
Leadership Caffeine™: Cultivating the Confidence to Act
For leaders at all levels, there’s much to gain from James D. Murphy’s excellent book, Courage to Execute: What Elite U.S. Military Units Can Teach Business About Leadership and Team Performance. Of the many quotable and thought-provoking items in the book, one that jumps out at me is Mr. Murphy’s perspective on courage. His words: “…but remember, courage is not bravado. Courage is the confidence to act that comes from preparation.”
It’s the lack of confidence to act that I observe as a derailment factor for so many teams from senior levels to functional or project groups. Here are 5 ideas to help cultivate the confidence to act on your team:
Guest Post: Building High Performance Teams with Heart
The best teams I’ve been a part of had something beyond high performance—they had heart. When the chips were down, these teams pulled together and delivered against the odds with brio. High performing teams with heart have a tremendous will to win, learn from failure, think hard work is a blast, trust their leaders, and never burn out. In this post, I’ve tried to distill the leadership behaviors and strategies I’ve observed throughout my career that create the kind of team dynamic that boosts performance to the highest level.
When did Passion for Your Work Become Passé?
Run a search on current business clichés or phrases to avoid and you’re likely to come across a number of references to the word passion. The writers tend to be passionate about the fact that passion is a term to avoid on your CV, during interviews and in other business references. Is it out of style to be vocal about your passion for your work, your profession or your firm?