The Leadership Caffeine Blog

Leadership Caffeine™: 5 Ways Leaders Can Promote an Outside-In View

Overcoming the gravitational pull of the office requires extraordinary effort. Succumb to this powerful tractor beam and your life is an endless stream of internal meetings and activities that lack any context for the realities of customers and the marketplace. Spend too much time inside your own walls, and you create your own alternate reality…one that lacks proper connectivity to the issues that should define your team’s priorities. Here are 5 ideas to help you and your team members change the view and cultivate critical marketplace context:

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Best of Leadership Caffeine™-How to Deal with Positive Praise

It’s easy to start believing the praise you hear in the hallways about your leadership approach. Easy and dangerous. I’ve always been leery of the unfounded and saccharine-sweet praise that is bestowed upon leaders. While you may call me cynical, I prefer to think of myself as pragmatic. Here are 5 ideas for delicately and appropriately coping with positive praise:

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Leadership Caffeine™-To Grow as a Leader, Master a Second Discipline

Of the many important themes espoused by the late and arguably pre-eminent management thinker of the latter part of the twentieth century, Peter Drucker, perhaps the most valuable to us as individuals, is his constant reminder that we are responsible for our own self-development. One of Drucker’s more provocative suggestions as described in William A. Cohen’s enjoyable read, “A Class with Drucker-The Lost Lessons of the World’s Greatest Management Teacher,” is for managers to actively work at developing expertise outside of their chosen field as a tool to preparing to become a senior or strategic leader. (Read More…)

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Leadership Caffeine™-Look to Workplace Partnerships to Support Growth

Many of the most accomplished professionals and leaders I’ve encountered point not to mentors as sources of guidance and inspiration, but rather to a particular workplace peer-level partnership as having been critical to their success. Here are some important Do’s and Don’ts when seeking to cultivate powerful workplace partnerships:

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Leadership Caffeine™-Why You Should Cultivate Your Inner Leadership Anthropologist

While there’s no substitute for live-fire action in learning to develop as a leader, well-honed skills of observation can provide useful perspectives on the actions and reactions of people to various leadership styles and approaches. Here are eight sets of questions/topics that will hone your leadership anthropology skills and support your own professional development program:

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Leadership Caffeine™-Coping with a Personal Leadership Confidence Deficit

Lack of self-confidence is a limiting factor in the leadership careers of many good professionals. This is a difficult and extremely personal topic. Here’s some added context to help you recognize that we all struggle with many of the same issues, however, with deliberate daily actions on the right issues, we can strengthen our confidence and improve our performance.

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Leadership Caffeine™: Listen with Intent

Yesterday, a valued colleague described a fascinating professional interaction and used the phrase, “listening with intent.”While I imagine it is something on the level of “seek first to understand,” the phrasing works for me. It connotes a significant and deep personal investment in focusing on another human…something lacking from most of our interchanges in life and in the workplace.

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