Recognizing the need to change something in your life or career is an essential first step. Breaking the bonds of the inertial forces that keep you tethered to the status quo is the hard part.
Fight Inertia
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The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Sometimes Leading Means Eating Culture for Lunch
There’s a stark contrast between caretaker leaders focused on the status quo and leaders who lead in the face of adversity and the need to change. The latter use the firm’s culture as a tool to enable change. They also draw upon these 11 key behaviors:
Leadership Caffeine™—Fight to Eliminate Obstacles
Too many firms act as their own worst enemies by sustaining rules and processes that no longer apply and that block the freedom and flexibility of employees and teams to experiment and innovate. Effective leaders and managers work daily to change or eliminate these blockers. Here’s a dose of encouragement and some ideas for you to spark a healthy revolution of change in support of your team:
Leadership Caffeine™—Seeing and Observing
We spend an incredible amount of time immersed in a world of our own fabrication—the world as it feels and looks and acts from inside our organization’s walls. It’s not the culture that will kill you, it’s the view. It’s time to change it. Take off the blinders and look up and out further. Extend your focal point.
Just One Thing—Think Big(ger)
I confess to having cultivated a strong affinity for Big Thinkers in my advancing years as an executive. The flip-side of this growing affinity is my creeping impatience and dismissal of small thinkers. Given the scale and scope of the challenges in our world and in our industries and firms, small thinkers are a drag on the drive to change. And yes, life and our careers are too short to think small.
High Performance Management—All Strategy Work is Personal
Most businesses and most management teams flail and fail when it comes to the work of strategy. In today’s world, where the long-cycle strategy process has been replaced by short-bursts of experimentation and iteration, it’s essential to reduce the fail and flail by attacking the root causes of so much dysfunction with this work. Here are 7-Steps to to help the senior team get it right:
Leadership Caffeine™—Running Uphill Against the Wind
The oft-cited and disturbingly dismal numbers reported about employee engagement tell an interesting story about leadership effectiveness…or the lack thereof. Even in an environment of aberrant leadership behavior and high levels of unengaged employees, you have the ability and obligation to carve our a “safe” zone where people are treated with respect and support.
Leadership Caffeine™—Uncertainty…Get Over It
Frankly, this is a remarkable time to be in business and to be serving in a leadership role. The risks, fears of change, possibilities of disruption or the realities of creative destruction and non-destructive creation are all facts of our business lives and they create a remarkable backdrop for us to create…to innovate. But first, we’ve got to fight our natural tendencies when determining how to act in this environment. Here are 3 key pitfalls to avoid and 5 key skills that leaders must cultivate to succeed in this ever-changing world:
For a Change, Try Embracing Change at Work
We all know that we live in an era of constant change. And more often than not, the thought of change at work is enough to send us scurrying for cover. However, hiding or simply allowing fear of the unknown to seize your emotions is the wrong approach in a situation that stands to be both a rich learning experience and an opportunity for you to showcase your value to your managers and your firm.
Art of Managing—How to Respond When the Experiment Goes Wrong
In the most successful firms I’ve been around, the managers actively promote experimentation and learning as core to everyone’s job. Yet, it’s not the words on the wall or even the words that come out of their mouths about experimentation, it’s the actions they take when things go horribly wrong that fosters the effective learning environment. Here are 3 counter-intuitive ideas for turning project failures into lessons learned that stick: