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The Leadership Caffeine Blog

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Leadership Caffeine™-Don’t Wait for the Title to Start Leading

Nov 15, 2009

The time to start leading is now, long before anyone has bestowed the title of leader on you. Much like the famous trio of Scarecrow, Lion and Tin Woodman of Oz-fame, they didn’t really need the Wizard to bestow a brain, courage or a heart, and you don’t need someone to anoint you as a leader before you can start learning and practicing. The great news is that today’s organizations are filled with opportunities for you to easily and informally develop both your leadership and your followership skills.

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Leadership Caffeine™-Develop the Courage to Derail the Bad Decision Train

Nov 9, 2009

The “bad decision train” is difficult to stop or derail once it gets moving. It seems to take extra-ordinary courage to admit that you are wrong. A combination of ego and fear often prevail, driving us to go all-in when we should fold and walk away. While the instinct to pursue bad decisions with more bad decisions might be difficult to overcome, it is critical that leaders fight this tendency by fostering a culture that encourages teams and individuals to challenge decisions, particularly when new facts and lessons learned begin to point towards a different direction.

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Once More On the SoapBox: Strategy and the Leader

Nov 4, 2009

There is no more mystical and in some cases mythical concept in all of business than the word, “Strategy.” Perhaps because it has been long claimed by academics and expensive consultants and bandied about exclusively by executives in boardrooms, while everyone else waits for the CEO to come down from on high with the clay tablets and of course, clarity, firmly in hand. Here are some suggestions for beginning to take the myth out of strategy in your organization:

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Leading in the Trenches-Recovering from Trickle Down Project Management Chaos

Nov 3, 2009

Project inflation…the spread of too many projects and the heaping of them upon the tormented and torn few is a formula for disaster. Unfortunately, work force reductions and pressures to reduce costs, improve processes and to innovate all fuel project inflation. Consider adopting a rigorous approach to project selection by asking and answering these following questions:

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Leadership Caffeine™-Bringing Confidence Back

Nov 2, 2009

Confidence is a powerful force in the workplace for individuals and for teams. It’s that extra-added something that allows us to look at the world through eyes that see opportunities to pursue, challenges that exist to be met and new heights within easy reach. Unfortunately, given the beat-down that most of the world has been taking for the past year or two, confidence is in short supply in the workplace. It’s time to bring confidence back.

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Two Voices-Humility and the Effective Leader

Oct 28, 2009

One of the true joys of my blogging experience comes from meeting and collaborating with some remarkable people. Mary Jo Asmus is one of those remarkable people. We collaborated a few months ago on Two Voices on: The Words of a Leader, and enjoyed the experience and the reactions so much that we vowed to do it again.

Well, we’re back. Mary Jo reached out to me a few weeks ago and raised the topic of “Humility and the Leader,” and we were both so interested in exploring this issue that we went off to our separate corners and the output is reflected in the two posts below. While the posts don’t necessarily reflect a point-counterpoint perspective, they do bring two unique perspectives to what turned out to be a challenging issue.

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Leadership Caffeine™-Engage With a Purpose

Oct 26, 2009

A fair number of leaders that I encounter are busy floating along on the current created by the urgent daily events in the workplace. This never-ending flow of “stuff to do” numbs their leadership senses and dulls their performance edges as weeks and months and quarters give way to more weeks, months and quarters. It’s like sitting in the leadership equivalent of a lazy river at the local water park. It’s time to quit doing everything and getting nothing important done in the process.

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Examples in Effective Top Leadership-The Ambassador

Oct 24, 2009

In contrast to last week’s Effective Top Leadership feature where I focused on an example inside a multi-national firm, this one is squarely in the small business category, topping out at about $20 million in annual revenues. While it was not a large firm, this organization and its founder left an indelible impression on customers, employees, suppliers and the southeastern U.S. communities that the firm served.

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Leading in the Trenches-So You’ve Always Wanted to Teach a Class!

Oct 21, 2009

As regular readers know, I’m kind of an education junkie, both as a receiver and as a giver. I spend my days developing and delivering leadership and marketing training programs and coaching individuals and groups, and I spend as many evenings as possible in front of a class somewhere, working hard to learn what it means to become an effective educator. I have not found the magic formula yet, but as I embark this evening on teaching an 8-week course on Global Business to a group of motivated professionals, it helps to review my basic approach to developing a great class. Additional advice welcomed and encouraged!

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Leadership Caffeine™: Surviving as a Leader When Things Go Horribly Wrong

Oct 18, 2009

When faced with unexpected challenges, a good friend of mine intones what I believe is a fitting old Yiddish quote, “Man Plans and God Laughs.” Our modern incarnation of that is a less reverent but eminently understandable, “Stuff Happens.” My word choice here is the less frequently referenced “S-word” from this common phrase.

Learning to cope with the unexpected deviation from your most carefully laid plans is an important part of growing up as a leader. Here are 7 suggestions for developing your crisis leadership skills.

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