The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Four Ideas for Leaders to Get Back-To-Learning this Fall Season
Why I Love September for the Back-to-Learning Feeling It’s funny how the cycle of our earlier lives carries through into our later years. For my entire life, I’ve loved the back-to-school time of the year. I still focus my post-Labor-Day schedule on kicking off new...
Four Ideas for Leaders to Get Back-To-Learning this Fall Season
We need more time to adjust our altitude to see the big picture in our industry or peer over the horizon in search of trigger events that might change everything. Here are four ideas to help stimulate leader learning.
A Checklist and Process to Create Daily Success at Work
Here’s a simple checklist process I use (and recommend to my clients) to help ensure they avoid the all activity/no vector trap.
Stepping In to Lead a New Group? Try This Process to Grow Trust and Gain Performance
If you’re an executive or top manager staring at a new group you’ve been assigned to lead and concluding you’ve got a lineup that looks destined for last place, it’s time to take action. Of course, most of those actions involve the person staring back at you in the mirror. Here’s a process that will help:
Career Reinvention Journal—Why Some Succeed Where Others Fail
A good number of people I encounter, talk about doing something different in their careers. For those individuals who cultivate the courage to pursue career reinvention, there are stark differences in the thinking and behaviors between those who succeed and those who don’t. Here are my observations based on several years working with dozens of aspiring career reinventors.
Why Trickle-Down Strategy Approaches Leave Your Employees Thirsty
Unless you’re in a start-up or small business, it’s impossible to have everyone in the firm physically “in-the-room” for strategy sessions. However, using a strategy-as-a-continuous-process approach, it is possible and desirable to involve everyone in the work of strategy from ideation to execution. But first, you’ve got to re-plumb the trickle-down strategy process approach to something significantly more inclusive.
Leadership Caffeine™—Six Skills Essential for Career Success
While there’s no one-formula-fits-all recipe for career success, there are common ingredients in the form of behaviors and skills. Here are the six base ingredients I see most often, albeit in different proportions
8 Ideas to Help You Regain Control at Work
It’s great to be busy, but excessive busyness comes from a flawed approach to your situation. Assert control over your priorities and time, and quit letting the lower priority items rent space in your mind. Here are 8 ideas to help:
Leading and Succeeding in the Gray-Zone
I’ve long believed learning to lead in the gray-zone inside organizations is a great approach for creating value, standing out, and getting ahead in your career. Here are 10 tips to help you tackle those vexing issues no one owns, by cultivating support and helping others succeed.
Investing in and Building Strategic Partnerships that Work
The best partnerships in my experience involve deep integration of business processes, including development, sales and marketing, and customer service, all aligned around a clear audience and strategy. Inherent in this process is the need for you to invest time and money, for people, product, promotion, and programs.
Leadership Caffeine™—4 Approaches of Great Problem-Solvers who Lead
Develop a reputation as someone everyone can count on to tackle the big, ugly issues, and watch the doors open. Of course, it pays to have a strategy to avoid the traps while stepping up to solving or fixing the problems others actively avoid. Here are 4 approaches to help: