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Leadership Caffeine™: It’s Vuja De All Over Again

Feb 15, 2010

I’m re-reading Tom Kelley’s outstanding book, “The Ten Faces of Innovation,” based on his experience with design firm IDEO, and came across his wonderful use of the phrase Vuja De (the opposite of that feeling we call Déjà vu) in the chapter on acting as an anthropologist to observe people’s true behavior. With apologies to Yogi Berra for borrowing and twisting his classic phrase, “It’s Deja Vu all over again,” a little Vuja De in your daily leadership life might just be the prescription to turbocharge team and individual performance.

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Leadership Caffeine™-It’s Time to Get Serious About Learning from Your Twenty-Somethings

Jan 31, 2010

One of the recurring themes in my writing and teaching activities is the importance of blending the generations in the workplace. I’ve been a cheerleader for this cause for the past few years and I truly believe that good managers everywhere must find opportunities to leverage the unique perspectives of experience, pragmatism and idealism available from this fascinating mix of time travelers. I’ve now moved beyond my polite encouragement for managers to find ways to adapt and cope with what seem to be the foreign habits and foreign viewpoints emanating from the more youthful in the workforce. It’s time to get serious about learning and benefitting from this younger generation.

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Leadership Caffeine™-Create Success by Managing Your Response to Failure

Jan 25, 2010

No one wants to fail. It’s not something that we typically seek out as part of our personal and organizational character building experience. However, from a distance, we tend to mythologize failure, especially in the context of achieving future success. Certainly, the stories are right and the lessons instructional. They inspire us to persevere, but the failure-leading to-success legends don’t guide us how to respond and cope in the moment.

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Leadership Caffeine™-Improving Your Leadership Effectiveness on the Fly

Jan 18, 2010

It probably comes as no surprise that the primary excuse that many leaders cite for not focusing on important priorities like coaching, feedback and development is, “ lack of time.”

I’ve heard this “excuse” over and over again in workshops and mentoring sessions. And while there’s little argument over the importance of engaging in these and other positive leadership behaviors, many individuals shrug their shoulders, admit guilt, express frustration over their inability to carve out time and cite administrative, transactional and span of control issues as impediments. What’s a harried, over-worked, time-stressed leader to do?

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Leadership Caffeine™: Learn to Manage Your Team’s Rhythm-6 Ideas for Improving

Jan 11, 2010

All teams and groups have a rhythm and natural energy for their tasks that ebb and flow based on a variety of factors, including personal, environmental and seasonal to name a few. As a leader, you should be aware of these cycles that are characterized by either intense creativity, outstanding productivity or on the other extreme, by a slow, plodding march through the days and weeks as if everyone’s feet were encased in clay. It’s your job to help smooth out the highs just a bit and minimize the time spent in the lows.

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Leadership Caffeine™-Develop a Big Picture View or Risk Becoming a Carp

Jan 4, 2010

Far too many leaders that I work with lack awareness of the broader forces swirling around their firms, their customers and those shape-shifting clusters that we describe as industries.

Given the hurricane like market and societal forces buffeting our globe today, a strategy of boarding up the windows and hunkering down is tantamount to committing corporate suicide. Yet, mostly by the sin of omission, this is exactly what I’m observing inside too many organizations.

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Leadership Caffeine™-An Effective Leader’s Resolutions are Calendar Blind

Dec 21, 2009

As a leader, you cannot afford to fall victim to the boom and bust cycle of annual resolutions. Rather, your challenge is a daily one, requiring you to manage your practices and habits in a program of perpetual self-improvement. Of course, identifying the right improvements requires you to have a real-time feedback system and the ability to keep your ego in check while as objectively as possible processing the daily evidence on your own performance.

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Leadership Caffeine™: Dare to Be Different-If You Dare

Dec 14, 2009

It’s good to be a good leader, so don’t misconstrue the message in this post. The world needs more individuals that care enough to consistently execute the blocking and tackling required to pass for effective leadership. My issue here is that good isn’t good enough, when the potential to be great at this activity that we call leading is within reach. Often, the distance of the reach to “great” is slightly beyond the cultural norms and leadership habits of the firm.

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Leadership Caffeine™: A Mostly Thoughtful Guide to Surviving Bad Leadership Days

Dec 7, 2009

Even the most dedicated and experienced of leaders will admit that there are more than a few days when they wonder whether it might not be a lot less stressful to hang up their leadership cleats in favor of an individual contributor role. Like marriage, not every day as a leader is filled with wine and roses. There are many days when you will drive home from work wondering whether you truly accomplished anything, and others when you will feel like you just took a few steps in the wrong direction.

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