Goals are critically important in our personal and professional growth. They push us to learn, grow, and strive. We change our lives by aspiring for big goals. We motivate ourselves and our team members with properly developed, challenging goals. And we change the vector and fate of organizations through the proper use of goals. The operative phrase is “the proper use of goals.”
The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Where Too Many Managers Hit the Wall on Their Level-Up Journeys
Developing as a manager is a perpetual exercise in leveling up. Just when you think you’ve developed some competence at the role and are asked to take on more responsibilities, WHAM, you hit the wall of new, ambiguous challenges. Here are the six big level up challenges I see for rising managers:
My Summer 2023 Professional Reading List
Here are my top choices for my personal Summer 2023 Professional Reading list.
The Death of The Manager Role: What’s Really Needed
As Layoffs Climb and AI Emerges, the Predictions are Flowing Like clockwork, bad news in the economy coupled with some scary new technology brings out the pundits offering exaggerated predictions for something or another. This time, the mass layoffs in techdom and a...
How to Create a Quality Feedback Culture that Supports Learning and Growth
While many managers work hard to construct and deliver timely behavioral feedback, few spend time working on their feedback culture. As a result, performance feedback is transactional—given on a one-off basis, but it doesn’t propel growth and learning across the entire group. Here are some tips to strengthen your team’s feedback culture.
The Culture, Strategy, and Performance Killing Spiral of Poor or No Feedback
While we regularly focus on feedback as an individual performance tool, it’s also a critical communication tool for driving improvement across groups and for processes and initiatives. Yet, this important, honest communication is in short supply in too many organizations.
Ten Questions to Support Continuous Career Growth
During our recent Leadership Caffeine Jam Session (recording and session materials/#18), I shared the ten questions I ask myself (and answer) about my career at least twice yearly. The late, great management thinker Peter Drucker suggested five questions; the other five are my add-ons.
A Manager’s Operating System and How it Guides Them
We’re at an all-hands, and all brains required time in our world, and the pressure is on those who manage to tap into the potential of their team members and teams. The Manager’s Operating System is a powerful tool to help create engagement and build high-performance.
It Takes Leadership Courage to Kick Conventional Wisdom to the Curb
Resilience, according to one dictionary definition, is the capacity to absorb a shock or a punch and return quickly to original form.
Life and business are filled with shocks and punches. We’ve lived this story for the past few years. And the shocks and punches keep coming, just in different forms and from unexpected places. It takes resilience and leadership courage to absorb the hits and come out stronger.
Six Big Insights from the Global Challenging Conversations Workshops
In a recent global workshop series, two groups of individuals added their international flavor to the challenging conversations, topics, and guidance. I share the highlights below.










