The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Wrestling With Feedback Part 3—Conduct Feedback Discussions with Empathy and Clarity
Part 1 in this series focused on Why We Don't Like the Idea of Giving or Receiving Feedback Part 2 offered Seven Actions to Help You Succeed with Feedback In Part 3 of this series, the emphasis is on managing the discussions successfully with empathy and clarity. It...
Wrestling With Feedback Part 3—Conduct Feedback Discussions with Empathy and Clarity
In Part 3 of this series, the emphasis is on managing the discussions successfully with empathy and clarity. It turns out when the feedback discussion goes off the rails, as happens all too often, it’s because empathy and clarity were nowhere to be found.
Bad Bosses, A Walk with Dante and Your Leadership Legacy
Ask a room full of mid-level managers to talk about great leaders that have supported them and you get a few nice stories. Ask them for examples of bad leaders and bad leadership practices and you may have to run for high-ground as the trickle of mildly repressed memories turns into a torrent of frightening anecdotes described by individuals with a far-away look in their eyes and a tone tinged with revenge in their voices.
In Search of the High Performance Project Team
If the informal survey results above are even remotely close to reality, many/most people have not had the experience to participate on a high performance project team. While successfully managing projects is a tough task, I do not believe that we are dealing with a degree of impossibility. If project success is critical to your organization’s advancement, everyone from the CEO on down has a vested interest in ensuring that greater than 10% of the project teams take on the characteristics of a high-performance environment.
How Healthy is Your Leadership Culture? Rate It Yourself and See or, “Rate it and Weep”
Chances are if you are like most of the business professionals that take the 10 question Leadership Culture Index below, your organization can use some improvement. A lot of improvement.
Leadership and the Winning Environment
From selecting and supporting the right people to caring enough to provide the tools, mentoring and constructive feedback, this leader, whether CEO, Shift Supervisor or High School Tennis Coach, is truly responsible for creating an environment that breeds success. Success as we know, tends to breed more success. It’s a wonderful, vicious cycle.
Your Next Boss Might Just Be a 20-something Level 5 Guild Leader
While to most it might seem implausible or even laughable that the leaders of tomorrow are applying skills developed from years of what we viewed as “wasting time” by playing on-line games, it merits some consideration. Certainly most organizations completely drop the ball on effectively identifying and developing leadership talent, and my own experience and research indicates that where most (new) leaders struggle is in the area of soft skills and feedback. You don’t learn how to lead from a book or sitting in a classroom at graduate school, so who’s to say that the on-line gaming environment is not an outstanding and risk-free way to develop leadership acumen.
Values-Based Leadership: More of What I Learned at Matsushita
I reflected on the Basic Business Principles as the values are known at Matsushita, when I co-authored the Values for a future employer, and I reflect and draw upon them regularly as I teach sections on Values-Focused Leadership in workshops and classrooms. A typical session will end with a majority of participants highlighting how they never understood until now how powerful the corporate values could be in strengthening their culture, driving performance and guiding behavior. This is a valuable lesson to learn for all of us.
Three Simple, Low Cost Ideas to Help Jump-Start Leadership Development
Jump-starting a leadership development activity does not require a tremendous investment in program development, outside consultants or big company meetings. Sometimes the best results come from simple approaches, and anything that gets people talking about the right issues can serve as a starting-point. The key point is for you to do something. Any or all of these three simple ideas can get you started.
Marketers, Are Trade Shows Extinct Yet?
This post is certain to generate some controversy about a long-standing, big investment marketing tactic that I believe is increasingly irrelevant. At the worst, if you read this and at least think about scrutinizing your investment in this marketing approach, I’ve done my job.
The thoughts were prompted by a recent article in BtoB magazine entitled: “Exhibition industry sees growth slowing.” What a shocker. And while the economy is identified as the primary culprit for this slowdown, I submit that this tactic is a carryover from another era when people gathered information and insights about prospective suppliers or service providers in a very different way, and when lead generation was more about trolling and interrupting than pinpointing.
Planning to Recognize Failure-The Project Manager’s Guide to Preventing Project Calamity
Every Project Manager with a few years of experience under his or her belt can likely recall at least one example of a major project that lived on long after the plug should have been pulled and the project canceled. The best (or worst) examples are the ego-driven initiatives of top executives that can’t let go for fear of losing face by admitting defeat.
More than a few organizations have been taken to or pushed over the edge by these self-anointed visionaries bent on changing their corporate world with some grand project. Once invested, they cannot let go, and if left unchecked, the results can be nothing short of disastrous for the organization.