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Leadership Caffeine™—Your Critical Personal Performance Questions

Dec 14, 2014

An early career mentor offered this comment and it has been with me in one form or another throughout my career: “If you’re sleeping through the night, you’re not thinking hard enough about your job and career and you’re definitely not asking yourself the tough questions.” While I encourage a full night’s rest…we all need quality sleep to perform at our best, the second half of his advice on asking (and answering) the tough questions of ourselves is spot on. Here are at least 11 sets of challenging questions that only you can ask and answer for yourself:

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Just One Thing—Practice Staying in the Moment

Nov 30, 2014

Our world of work is filled with quick sound-bite exchanges and constant interruptions. Many of us have learned to cope with competing stimuli and the pressure to move faster and faster in our daily transactions, yet there is a cost to working this way…

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A Leader’s Reasons to Be Thankful

Nov 27, 2014

This is an annual post at Management Excellence, offered in the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S. It’s a nice time for leaders to pause and recognize the many reasons they have to be thankful for the privilege of serving.

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The Sticky Topics of Senior Management Team Chemistry & Performance

Nov 5, 2014

The use of the word “team” to reference the collection of a firm’s senior leaders is generous at best and fallacious in many cases. Senior managers don’t necessarily gel as a team and perhaps a more accurate description of them in the context of a group might be that they are a collection of intelligent, successful functional leaders who occasionally come together and tolerate each other for a few hours of collegial discussion. Here are a number of ideas to get the toxicity out and the performance up:

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Leadership Caffeine™—Is that Employee Not Right or Not Ready?

Nov 3, 2014

We all know that getting the right people in the right seats is a prerequisite for success. The problem comes in truly assessing whether the individual is Not Ready or Not Right for the role. Here are 4 reasons why we often fail to recognize the “Not Right” characters and 5 ideas to help you deal with this dilemma:

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Leadership Caffeine™—What Frequency are You Broadcasting On?

Oct 7, 2014

In a conversation with a good friend and highly respected retained search professional, the topic of a “leader’s frequency” was raised. I like the metaphor, although my friend might describe it as much more real than metaphor. In my own experience, the leaders who stand out…the ones who moved the needle for teams, individuals and organizations all broadcast on a frequency that is easy for us to hear and to understand with minimal amounts of noise to distract us from the message.

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Leadership Caffeine™—In Challenging Times, Keep Fear and Failure Outside Looking In

Sep 28, 2014

Every organization and every team runs into challenging spots. Life and business don’t always work as planned. “Man plans and God laughs,” as my former CEO would recite. It’s the rough patches that teach you and require you to cultivate your leadership character, and part of this is keeping fear at bay and the specter of failure out of mind and out of the vocabulary of your team. Here are 6 ideas to help you fight off organizational fear and keep your team on track when the going gets rough:

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Art of Managing—Don’t Set Artificial Limits on Employee Involvement

Sep 15, 2014

A firm’s senior leaders and managers are supposed to feel the weight of responsibility for the health of their organization. It comes with the job. However, no one suggested they bear the weight of the worries or the burden of finding the solutions in silence and without ample support from the broader employee population. Here are 6 ideas to help you jump-start improved employee involvement in strengthening your business:

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Art of Managing—It’s Your Job to Bring Your Firm’s Values to Life

Sep 10, 2014

I’ve long been a student of the values that organizations espouse. They are after all an attempt to encapsulate the accepted and aspirational behaviors of the firm’s employees and officers. And while words on the wall or in the placard are typically interesting, noble and even somewhat predictable, what’s truly fascinating is to compare and contrast the behaviors of people in an organization to the values statements hanging on the wall. Sadly, in too many organizations, the values statements are corporate furniture. Here are some thoughts on how you can help bring your firm’s values to life and strengthen performance in the process:

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