The Leadership Caffeine Blog

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Leadership Caffeine™-Of Crucibles and Leadership Character

Two job candidates walk into a coffee shop. One has a spotless record of achievement and accomplishments and a career that runs upward like a steep staircase from early career until now. His life reads like a storybook we can all smile about and wish ourselves to be so fortunate. This is a solid professional. The other candidate’s record is good, however, there are several points in time when things went wrong… . The first candidate is compelling, but the second candidate is likely my choice. Here’s why.

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Leadership Caffeine™: Accelerate New Leader Development

In my experience, many senior managers move too slowly to expose their developing leaders to new and more challenging situations. This is a mistake that artificially inhibits professional growth and potentially risks losing the interest of your best and brightest emerging leaders. Here are 5 ideas to help you move opportunities along at a faster pace, and a polite reminder that nothing is free. You’re on the hook for coaching every step of the way.

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Leadership Caffeine™: 4 Common Project Leadership Mistakes to Avoid

The team or project leader’s responsibility is not to find a way to squash the variance in personalities, but rather to foster the right environment for people who are different to come together and perform. Here are four key mistakes to avoid as you seek to align your collection of challenging personalities around your project and pursue great performance.

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Leadership Caffeine™: Jump-start Your Team’s “Ideas to Actions” Machine

Ideas in the workplace that are voiced but never vetted or pursued are the corporate equivalent of those brilliant insights we have in the middle of the night that we don’t bother to write down. “I’ll remember it in the morning,” we think at the time. We rarely do. Here are 7 ideas to help you jumpstart your firm’s “ideas to Actions” machine:

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Leadership Caffeine™: How to Survive a Sudden Promotion Into Leadership

One of the oddities of organizational life is the fairly frequent and sudden promotion of individuals from competent individual contributor to someone responsible for the work of others…supervisor or manager, without any visible sign of mentoring or support for the newly in-charge individual. “Congratulations…go get ‘em Tiger.” Here are 6 ideas to help you survive this challenging new assignment:

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Leadership Caffeine™-5 Priceless Lessons from Amundsen and Scott

In preparation for an upcoming presentation, I’ve become a bit obsessed with studying the 1910 expeditions and race between Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott to 90-degrees South (the South Pole). The lessons for leaders and managers practically leap off the pages of this classic example of coping with risk, uncertainty and volatility. Here are 5 lessons from these remarkable expeditions that you can apply in your work-life today:

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