Wake-Up Calls for Managers
For the hard parts no one prepares you for
When the path isn’t clear, the stakes are high, and the answers aren’t obvious—this is where managers struggle most.
Wake-Up Calls for Managers delivers practical, real-world guidance for navigating:
- Tough conversations
- Leading through uncertainty
- Building influence without authority
- Driving results through others
The Leadership Caffeine Blog
The Culture, Strategy, and Performance Killing Spiral of Poor or No Feedback
Do These Describe Your Environment? In my programs, consulting work, and coaching, I regularly encounter these situations: Managers struggling with an employee's performance, yet they've provided little to no feedback, or their feedback was watered down to the point...
The Culture, Strategy, and Performance Killing Spiral of Poor or No Feedback
While we regularly focus on feedback as an individual performance tool, it’s also a critical communication tool for driving improvement across groups and for processes and initiatives. Yet, this important, honest communication is in short supply in too many organizations.
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.
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.