The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Think Differently About Engaging with Your Organization’s Top Leaders
Avoiding Your Firm's Top Leaders Isn't a Great Strategy A few years ago, I worked with an individual who was afraid to get caught in an elevator with an executive. His fear: "I have no idea what to say to them, and whatever comes out of my mouth makes me sound like an...
Think Differently About Engaging with Your Organization’s Top Leaders
Your assumption that they’re busy doing top-leader things and don’t want to hear from you is partially flawed. Most senior leaders I’ve worked with and around love to hear from individuals at all levels. Here are five ideas to help you think differently about engaging with your organization’s top leaders:
Leadership Lessons Learned in a Crane and While Sitting on A 5 Gallon Pail
Note from Art: my week of alternative blog fare continues with this very autobiographical reflection on the formation of my later life leadership viewpoints! It’s remarkable what you can learn and do if your attitude is focused on finding ways to improve and turning so-called down-time into time for creativity and improvement.
Leading in the Trenches: How Well Do You Know Your Customers?
If you don’t know your customers at a sufficient level of detail, including their hopes, dreams and emotions, everything you are doing includes a high degree of guesswork and randomness. Your messaging likely includes a great deal of blah blah about your firm. Promotional activities are fired from a shotgun, and while they occasionally hit something, there is no viable, sustainable marketing system in place.
Leadership Caffeine™-The Cure for Tired Leader Syndrome (TLS)
If you experience one or more of these symptoms and especially the last one, you might be suffering from Tired Leader Syndrome or TLS. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. This debilitating condition affects a high percentage of leaders that have been in the same role for too long. Left untreated, TLS is often fatal to your career as well as the careers of those in constant contact with you.
Guest Post-A Fresh Voice on Developing Executive Presence
Note from Art: Today’s post is from Jeff Hornstein, a Speaking Coach and someone passionate about helping individuals and teams develop their critical presentation skills. I invited Jeff to share his thoughts and ideas on “Executive Presence” and he was kind enough to contribute this post and his wonderfully useful pdf guidebook, “Communicating Credibility.”
Building Better Leaders-One At A Time
I had an interesting kitchen table discussion recently with a friend who questioned my belief in the ability to change the world by helping support the development of effective leaders. His point: for every one person that actually “gets it” and develops into an effective, values-driven and people-focused leader, dozens of “incompetent idiots” will end up in positions of responsibility and the cycle of horrible leadership and lousy leaders will continue.
Leadership Caffeine™-The Times Choose the Leaders. Is it your time?
If you’ve been around the block for a few decades as a leader, your current To-Do list doesn’t feel as good as the one you had for most of the 90’s and the middle of this decade. However, the benefit of your experience is that you know that we’ll find our way through this fog of uncertainty and fear and doubt. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know the absolute path.
Leaders Teach
I’ve long believed that the best leaders are teachers. Not lecturers, but teachers. As teachers, they challenge us to think, to explore, to experiment, to learn and to keep trying. (click on the title to read the entire essay.)
Leadership Caffeine™-Does Your Do Match Your Tell?
Fresh on the heels of my remarkably fun and productive collaboration with Mary Jo Asmus of Intentional Leadership on “The Words of a Leader,” I feel duty bound to remind you that while words are indeed powerful tools for creation or destruction, it’s your actions that will seal your fate as a leader. Or rather, how well your actions and your words match.
Two Voices on: The Words of a Leader
This dual post was the outcome of a casual exchange of thoughts via Twitter that quickly evolved into a must-write piece and fun collaboration on an important topic: the words of a leader. My partner in crime here is Mary Jo Asmus, the author of the outstanding Intentional Leadership blog…one that I turn to regularly for inspiration and insight.
Good leaders are builders and they form and shape their words into phrases and questions that encourage learning and improvement and risk-taking and more learning. Good leaders are master craftsmen in many ways, and words are some of their most important tools. Less effective leaders use words like tools as well, but in this case they crassly apply the words of brute force in settings where precision is called for