The point in time when you step into a new leadership role is simultaneously exciting and uncomfortable. Your start-up as the new boss is the early-awkward phase for everyone involved. Here are six steps to help you start strong with your new team:
The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Gray-Zone Leadership—A Powerful Formula for Career Success
It turns out, learning to spot and seize gray-zone opportunities is a spectacularly great way to get ahead in your career.
Leadership Caffeine™—Here’s Where You Should Slow Down to Move Faster
It’s easy to swallow the dogma that has emerged around the “Cult of Speed” in our management thinking and teaching. Yet, the pursuit of speed in poorly designed systems exposes weaknesses and often precipitates project, strategy, and even organizational failure. Said simply, raw speed kills. Sometimes you have to tap the brakes and slow down to ultimately move faster.
Our Early 2021 Professional and Career Development Programs
We create programs to help people achieve things they never thought possible in their careers. From first-time managers to senior executives, career reinventors, people navigating challenging conversations, or individuals working to level up, we strive to bring this purpose to life in everything we do.
Discovering the Right Approach for Leading in this Era
Much like the alchemist’s search, discovering the “just right” leadership style in today’s maelstrom of issues and wicked problems is elusive. Yet, for those striving to lead successfully, there is hope, and it comes in the form of a blended, adaptive model of leading.
Wrestling with Feedback Part 2—Seven Actions to Help You Succeed
For many managers, giving and receiving feedback is challenging. However, when feedback is approached properly, it can be a powerful tool for strengthening individual and group performance. Here are seven actions you can take to succeed with feedback:
Wrestling With Feedback, Part 1—Why We Don’t Like the Idea of Giving or Receiving It
We all can benefit from the right type of specific, behavioral, task, or situational-focused feedback. Unfortunately, our natural fear of either giving or receiving feedback often gets in the way of harnessing value from this input.
Leadership Caffeine™—5 Things You Can Do to Help Navigate the Crisis
We place extraordinary amounts of pressure on our leaders to solve the big problems in front of us. In reality, they don’t have the answers. They are looking for individuals to provide ideas that point to solutions. Here are five ideas you can use today to help and start leading without authority:
Leadership Caffeine™—Now is the Time to Double-Down on the Fundamentals of Effective Leadership
In the face of complexity and risk, the simplest solutions are generally the best ones. These are indeed challenging times for anyone responsible for managing and leading initiatives, teams, and functions. It might seem as if answers are hard to come by, yet, the...
Four Big Ideas to Help You Cultivate Influence in a Sharp-Elbowed Environment
I love the “clean power” approach to cultivating influence because it’s how I choose to conduct myself. Many others have adopted their version of it for similar reasoning. However, not everyone plays by rules you deem fair, and not everyone has your interests at heart. Here are four ideas to help you survive and thrive when you find yourself working in a sharp-elbowed environment.










