The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Treat Your Career Pivot as an Agile Project to Make Progress Faster
Finding "Next" in Your Career is an Agile Project If you know exactly what you want to do for the next stage of your career, consider yourself fortunate. For many, the drive to do something new and different is blunted by the inability to answer the "What?" or...
Treat Your Career Pivot as an Agile Project to Make Progress Faster
Using a disciplined, agile project management approach might be the most important thing you can do to succeed in identifying the right “next” in your career. Here are ideas to help.
Leadership Caffeine™—Too Much Time with the Wrong People
If I could have all of the time back working with poor performers, people in dire need of an attitude adjustment or, people who momentarily fooled naive, noble me into believing they wanted to change their ways, I would gladly reinvest it with those seeking to grow and strengthen as professionals. Early in my career, I believed that I could by sheer force of will turn poor performers into stars and help those with poor attitudes emerge as model citizens. I believed I possessed the leader’s equivalent of the Philosopher’s Stone and could turn lead into gold.
The Feedback Series—Part 5: Managing the Discussion
Your planning work based on the guidance in the first four posts in this series is intended to set the stage for an effective, constructive discussion. In part five, we turn our attention to managing the discussion. Here are six key issues you must take into account in every feedback discussion and ideas for helping you navigate three common, challenging feedback situations:
It’s Your Career—Seriously, Why Should Your Boss Invest in You?
Certainly, no self-respecting, capable manager ignores the professional development components of her role. However, I can tell you with near certainty, that your manager is much more interested in investing in you if she sees you investing in yourself. Why not give her some reasons to help you stay ahead of the game. Here are six ideas that just might convince the boss to invest more in you:
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.