The Leadership Caffeine Blog
What I Learned from Your Team Members that Might Help You Manage More Effectively
While I support your team members' development through workshop programs and one-on-one coaching, my primary job is listening. Without violating our sacred commitment to confidentiality, here are some of the big themes I heard this year that might just help you manage...
What I Learned from Your Team Members that Might Help You Manage More Effectively
While I support your team members’ development through workshop programs and one-on-one coaching, my primary job is listening. Without violating our sacred commitment to confidentiality, here are some of the big themes I heard this year that might just help you manage more effectively.
Teaching a Senior Team To Dance With Leadership Development
There is no silver bullet for creating an effective leadership culture, but there is a straightforward formula: focus, time and discipline. And of course, practice, practice and more practice. How well does your senior team dance when it comes to leadership development?
“He Liked to Ride Through the Camp Just to Hear the Salutes”
We all know and have witnessed leaders like the one described in the quote above. They are visible by how much they feed on the limelight and adulation of their employees. This leader walks into a room with the silent pronouncement of “I’m here” and energizes as people acknowledge his or her greatness. He or she is usually quick with a joke and all too happy to grab the podium and ramble on about the great things they are doing for the organization.
Ironically, Mid-Level Managers May Save Your Business
Ever since terms like reengineering, right sizing and downsizing became part of the corporate lexicon; midlevel managers have been taking it on the chin. This once populous class has been synergized and right-sized almost to extinction. Those that remain often struggle with spans of control as wide as the Golden Gate Bridge and limited authority that is constantly challenged from above and below. I find it just a bit ironic (and appropriate) that this much-abused class of leader may just hold the key to surviving and prospering in tough times.
Can You Create A Mission-Driven Focus in a For-Profit Business?
Leaders from the top on down in Not-For-Profits hold an unfair advantage over their erstwhile counterparts in the For-Profit world. Managers in Not-for-Profit are driven by a powerful sense of purpose that delivers meaning and context for even the most mundane of activities. As one young Not-For-Profit manager in my recent Leadership Mastery workshop indicated, “I can’t imagine not having the mission to inspire and energize me everyday.”
My question: Can For-Profit organizations replicate the motivational and contextual power of “The Mission” through other proxies like goals, strategies, bonuses and targets all focused around competitors, financials and metrics like market-share and compound annual growth rate?
Vacation Reading
One of the biggest challenges that I face every vacation is trying to decide what I’m going to read. Usually, I don’t decide and I end up lugging 40 pounds of books with me just in case I might be in the mood for a certain work. (Note: I know that the Kindle from Amazon will solve this problem…I just can’t get beyond my “I don’t buy the first generation of any consumer electronics” rule.) Eventually, I thrift my choices down to a full duffel bag (for driving trips), and when my wife is not looking, I sneak a few additional volumes into someone else’s bag or under the seat. I guess I’m a book smuggler.
Want to Kill a Few Brain Cells, (Try and) Read a Management Textbook
And while I’m loving the experience, I can’t help but observe that the textbooks are some of the most mind-numbing, coma-inducing products ever to emerge from Gutenberg’s great creation. In particular, the Management text in my Fundamentals of Management course this Spring is almost certain to drive the most interested of business majors to consider something more exciting like accounting or neurophysiology. What a shame to take a noble and exciting and complicated topic like management and wrap a bunch of dead theories in-between some interesting case studies and let that suffice for something that is supposed to teach the fundamentals of management.
The Emerging and Strange Alliance Between Boomers and Millennials
If you are leading a team today, chances are you are dealing with one of the fascinating experiences of our time: how to manage teams increasingly comprised of aging Boomers and newly graduated Millennials. Your first thought might be that you couldn’t find two groups farther apart in terms of values, priorities, interests and capabilities. Well, your first thought is wrong.
The Project Management Discipline of Strategy Execution
Strategy execution is where value is created. The best plans are worthless unless they are backed by a group of people that understand their roles and accountabilities and that have the information they need when they need for rapid decision-making. Execution never takes place in a straight line and without setbacks. In fact, the setbacks are powerful learning experiences that a good team will leverage as it adapts and responds to internal and external factors.
A large part of the solution in my opinion is treating execution like a high-order program comprised of a series of projects to be managed. Ask a good Project Manager how to successfully pull of an execution program and I suspect they won’t need to interview 1,000 companies.
Yeah, “Why Don’t Managers Think Deeply?”
Professor James Heskett highlights GE CEO Geoffrey Immelt’s recent pronouncements that he is: looking for managers to think deeply about innovations that will ensure GE’s longer-term success. He has vowed that he will protect those working on the breakthroughs from the “budget slashers” focused on short-term success. (Professor Heskett also reviews the book Marketing Metaphoria and the perspectives of the authors: Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman on why managers don’t think deeply.)
As I leader, I’ve wrestled with this topic for years, and have worked around and with many individuals perfectly content to let their days unfold in a transactional nature, with no time to think deeply or even strategically. Days pass into months and months to years, and still these individuals prefer conquering the issue of the moment versus wondering whether they are even working on the right issues.