The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Leadership Caffeine™—Harnessing the Power of Purpose in Your Work
What Work Should Be Perseverance and Ingenuity—what great names! I'm speaking of the Mars Rover and the small helicopter that hitched a ride all the way to the red planet. After all, it took both perseverance and ingenuity from many over the more significant part of...
Leadership Caffeine™—Harnessing the Power of Purpose in Your Work
If we’re not involved in moon-shots or mars-shots but rather working for seemingly pedestrian causes or offerings, how do we manufacture that sense of purpose? It’s easy, fall in deep love with the people we’re ultimately helping with our work.
The Problem(s) with Teams
It’s increasingly likely that you will spend a good deal of your professional time working on temporary teams. It’s also likely that you will experience a fair amount of frustration and even team failure along the way. Most organizations have yet to meet a problem (or opportunity) that they won’t throw a team at to solve. Let’s face it, it’s tempting to assume that a group of motivated, diverse individuals will trump the lone soldier when it comes to creativity, problem-solving and planning.
Or, at least it’s comfortable to think so.
Help Wanted: Leaders with Moral Courage
It’s nice to think that most people and most organizations if given the choice between clear right and wrong would opt for right, but reality and a solid decade of scandals, horrendous decisions and now, environmental disasters, suggests that we’re not ready to declare victory on this issue.
Leadership Caffeine™-5 Ideas for Improving Your Ability to Engage as a Leader
Some leaders move through their days like a flat rock skipping over the surface of a pond. They are focused on personal efficiency and speed, and the faster they move and the more decisions that they make, the better they believe they are doing as leaders. They are transactional leaders. Their days are blurs of decisions, quick meetings, hurried hallway exchanges and even more hurried text and e-mail messages, often created while they are present but not engaged in the event or conversation of the moment. If improving performance, fostering a culture of learning and innovation and developing the confidence to tackle the tough topics are all important for your firm, it’s time to engage more and transact less.
Apply Distance and Anonymity to Improve Idea Generation
The default approach in most organizations and on most teams for idea generation is to conduct a brainstorming meeting. You know the drill. A meeting notice is sent out, and everyone assembles at the appointed time, prepared to “ideate.” The moderator reminds...
Creativity and the Leader
A Fast Company article entitled, “The Most Important Leadership Quality for CEOs? Creativity” (referenced by SmartBrief on Leadership), indicates, “For CEOs, creativity is now the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking, according to a new study by IBM.” As you might imagine, creativity as a quality supplanting integrity and honesty is generating a fair amount of controversy.
The Wonderful and Vexing Quality of Sticktoitiveness
Woody Allen famously offered that, “80% of success is showing up.” In my opinion, about 99% of success is Sticktoitiveness, which is much about being doggedly persistent in the face of overwhelming obstacles. That awkward non-word is one of the attributes that I look for in hiring talent and one that I’ve observed over and over again in the most successful professionals that I’ve encountered.
Leadership Caffeine™: Are You Capable of Putting It All On the Line?
Are you capable of putting it all on the line for the right issues? Your career isn’t worth a budget or a product feature or a resource squabble. Those disagreements are part of the normal process of working together, and developing effective negotiating skills and learning to give and take are what we do to help propel movement inside organizations. Putting it on the line is however worth it when the conflict involves a legal issue, or, any issues that potentially impact life or environmental safety. It’s time for all of us to build courage into our roles as leaders and to teach and reward courage on our teams.
Art to Help Kick-Off Project Leadership Forum at Harrisburg University
As a long-time, self-described zealot for the importance of project managers developing as leaders, imagine how excited I was to learn about a conference devoted to just this topic! I’ve written at length in this blog (Learning to Lead in the Project Focused World and others) and even offered up my e-book, Leadership and the Project Manager, in support of this concept. I’m even more excited to be a part of the conference as a guest keynote as Project Leadership Forum kicks-off on Thursday in Harrisburg, PA.
Leadership Caffeine™: 7 Ideas to Help Leverage Different Perspectives on Your Team
One of the most common tripping points of both early-career and experienced leaders is assuming that people are looking at issues and drawing similar conclusions. Your goal as a leader must be to help create a common picture and to facilitate the development of creative solutions. This starts with recognizing that differences in perspective are the building blocks for creative solutions.