The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Leadership Caffeine™—Are You the Cause of Your Team’s Creativity Deficit?
Creativity—the ability to look at complicated situations and identify novel solutions that solve problems, advance initiatives, or rewrite old rules—may be the most critical skill of all in our workplaces. As leaders, we need to foster it, stimulate it, and do...
Leadership Caffeine™—Are You the Cause of Your Team’s Creativity Deficit?
Creativity—the ability to look at complicated situations and identify novel solutions that solve problems, advance initiatives, or rewrite old rules—may be the most critical skill of all in our workplaces. As leaders, we need to foster it, stimulate it, and do everything we can to ensure we’re not the ones suppressing it. Sadly, creativity is something that many leaders trample all over in their daily activities.
Leadership Caffeine™-Get Invested in Developing Your New Leaders
I’ve yet to run a workshop or program on leadership where anything approaching a majority of the participants describe their initial days of their initial role as a team leader, supervisor or manager as a period when they received much if any support and coaching from their own direct manager. Most describe this particularly precarious professional time as more like a “hit and run.” That’s unfortunate, because the flame-out rate for first-time leaders is high and the fallout on those around them heavy. Here are 8 ideas for you to strengthen your support of your first-time leaders:
Newsletter #2 Next Week & Art’s Writings Last Week
Look for the latest issue of the Leadership Caffeine Newsletter (subscriber only content) next week. And in case you missed it, here are links to Art’s posts on decision-making, strategy and career survival from last week. Enjoy your weekend!
Weekend Career Focus-Invest in Your Professional Survival Skills
Too many people are caught seemingly by surprise (for some odd reason) that all bets are off on promises of on-going employment
Lessons in Management Innovation from Main Street
During the past few years, I’ve marveled at the start-ups and small to mid-sized businesses in my community who didn’t need an army of consultants or MBAs to teach them the very relevant and important lessons that Reeves and Deimler share in their recent Harvard Business Review article, “Adaptability-The New Competitive Advantage.”
Leadership Caffeine™: Teach Your Team Smart(er) Decision Processes
Nothing happens without a decision. Nothing good happens without the right decision. And, in case you doubt the need to focus on making better decisions, spend some time skimming the news. If you’ve kept up with your health and fitness resolutions thus far this year, you know that even minor adjustments in diet and exercise pay big dividends. The same goes for our individual and group decision-making approaches. Here are 5 key questions and suggestions for strengthening your team’s decision-making processes.
Leadership Caffeine™ at Information Management and New Newsletter Resource
Two news items here at Management Excellence: First, as of February 1, 2012, the good folks at Information Management are kindly syndicating selected posts from my blog at their resource rich website: info-mgmt.com under my name and the Leadership Caffeine label. And second, I’m pleased to announce the launch of a new resource to support your professional development…the Leadership Caffeine Newsletter.
No One Asked My Opinion…But $100 Billion for What?
As of this writing, the world is abuzz with the expected Facebook IPO. The number $100 billion is being floated and passed around (probably by those who stand to benefit from a big IPO), and whether real or wild speculation, that’s a number that gives one cause to pause. This is beginning to feel like Déjà vu all over again (thanks, Yogi Berra), much like that fascinating period in the late ‘90’s when stratospheric valuations were applied to firms that had no products, no earnings and sometimes no revenues.
Leadership Caffeine™: Change or Learn to Say, “Would You Like Fries with That?”
Much of the pablum that is passed off for guidance on leading others ignores the reality that the context in which we lead has changed from just a few years ago, and it continues to change faster than any of us can truly understand. While it’s a bit disheartening to realize that those of us with much time under our belts and more than a few laps around the block of life are vestiges of a bygone business era, we are. That doesn’t mean we can’t be relevant, but first, we have to understand and accept some of the important contextual changes in our world of business:
Strategy-Towards Hypotheses, Experiments, Involvement & Learning
Few would argue that a nimble, quick-to-learn and quick-to-adapt organization is a bad thing. Given the rate of change in our world, those characteristics are increasingly table-stakes for survival and success. Why then has the approach to strategy and the notion of “strategic planning” in so many organizations remained mired in a 1960’s kind of static, top-down event-focused model? Here are six ideas to transform your organization’s approach to and effectiveness with strategy.