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Leadership Caffeine™: Managing Risk Without Stifling Experimentation

Nov 8, 2010

The art and science of management is much about coping with risk. There are few certain outcomes in business, and that’s particularly true when we factor in the reality that people are darned complex and don’t always act rationally. More often than not, I see managers and leaders looking at their world through the eyes of “what can go wrong?” and basing their decisions solely on attempting to minimize those identified adverse outcomes. Here are 5 ideas that leaders can use to help experimentation flourish on their teams.

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Leadership Caffeine™: Learning to Ask for Help

Nov 1, 2010

I’ve not met a person yet that doesn’t need help from time to time, and this goes double for anyone in a leadership role. Leadership is frequently lonely and those that take their role seriously truly fret over decisions surrounded by ambiguity. The pressure to “figure it out” is tremendous, partially imposed by our fast moving and politically charged working environments, and partially imposed by our own misguided sense that to show that we need help is to show weakness. Here are seven ideas for properly and professionally asking for help.

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Marketers: 4 Ideas to Avoid Falling Victim to The Felt Need

Oct 26, 2010

The article, “The Felt Need” by Dan and Chip Heath in the November, 2010 issue of Fast Company is worth the price of the annual subscription for it’s reminder value alone. The Heaths tackle a topic that just about all of us involved in selling, marketing or strategy have succumbed to at some point in our careers: the felt need versus the burning need. Here are four ideas to avoid being victimized by “The Felt Need.”

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Management Lessons Learned While Consuming Too Much Hospital Food

Oct 15, 2010

Little things make a big difference when a loved one is ill, and while our filters are tuned to high, doctors and healthcare professionals and hospitals are in the ultimate customer care business, and we as customers are quick to notice great performance as well as the occasional lapses. The many leadership and customer care observations and lessons are still top-of-mind following our recent experience, and I’ve noted a few below. It’s a fair bet that these lessons apply across disciplines and professions as well.

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Leadership Caffeine™: In Praise of Consistency

Sep 19, 2010

Take a few minutes to think about the best leaders that you’ve ever worked for. What terms best describe them? Chances are the word “consistent” didn’t show up in the top five. Perhaps it should.
Consistency may just be the very unsexy and uninspiring element to your leadership style that will help you grow your credibility and allow you to create and sustain a working atmosphere that allows your team members to prosper.

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Finding Time to Focus or, Speed Kills

Aug 25, 2010

The lot of professionals inside many organizations can easily be characterized by a series of endless status meetings, hurried hallway conversations and messages quickly dispatched on a pda while walking, ignoring the meeting in process or consuming a protein bar on the run. Nonetheless, work gets done, customers are served and growth often created. I do however, worry and wonder about the human costs and the cost to the organization in lost-ideas, missed opportunities and a much more superficial existence.

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Leadership Caffeine™: Quit Managing Reduced Expectations

Aug 10, 2010

A great friend and talented product manager once offered in a moment of frustration that he viewed his principal job as one of “managing reduced expectations.” This brilliant, but depressing turn of words reflected bigger business problems, including a logjam in development that effectively precluded us from doing anything to enhance the competitiveness of our products in a timeframe shorter than something that you might find on a geologic time-scale. The “managing reduced expectations” seems to be a theme inherent in our society right now, and it is a dangerous mind-set.

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Leadership Inspiration from the Howard Schultz HBR Interview

Jul 27, 2010

If you’re looking for a breath of fresh leadership air and some hope in this world after watching CEOs doing the Perp Walk or the Resignation Shuffle, read the interview, “We Had to Own the Mistakes” with Howard Schultz, Starbucks Chairman and CEO, in the July-August, 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review. While Schultz is no stranger to our world as an iconic founder of one of the world’s most successful and formerly fastest growing firms, one might argue that he didn’t earn his leadership stripes until faced with the unexpected challenging of turning the firm around.

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The Triple Threat to Good Decisions: Data, Time and Emotion

Jul 22, 2010

There are few situations more challenging to teams than dealing with a tough, emotionally-charged issue and decision-choice while facing significant time pressure and seemingly contradictory data. If that type of situation sounds uncommon or unrealistic, consider that many firms and management teams make critical priority calls and strategic choices under just such circumstances. The decision to launch Challenger was a prime example, with all three factors playing a huge role in this tragic call. Countless corporate strategic misfires owe their outcome to this triple-threat of data, time and emotion. While many situations don’t involve life-safety issues, this triple-threat is something that every manager should be critically sensitive to in their group and strategic decision-making.

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Team Conflict? As Long as It’s Not Personal, Run With It

Jul 21, 2010

I’m leery of happy teams. Don’t get me wrong. I like positive experiences and working with happy people, however, in my experience, the happy teams are the ones that produce mediocre results or, they don’t produce at all. Give me a group of people that show up to do battle on the issues versus the team that strives for peace and harmony, any day.

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