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Leadership Caffeine™: The Noble Pursuit of Power and Influence

Aug 30, 2010

Power and influence are not dirty words. Both are components of every organization’s environment and both must be carefully cultivated to succeed as a formal or informal leader. Power and influence provide the motive power behind organizations and initiatives and the lubrication that keeps the parts and people from binding and grinding and self-destructing. Here are 6 key reasons why cultivating power and influence is good for your career.

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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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6 Steps for Avoiding Groupthink on Your Team

Jul 8, 2010

Groupthink is one of the nefarious decision-making missteps of teams, and a trap that many smart people and groups have fallen victim to throughout history. From the classic example cited in nearly every discussion on decision-making, the Kennedy administration’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, to Ford’s launch of the Edsel, to Neviille Chamberlin’s inner circle that believed peace with Hitler was at hand, Groupthink has earned a prominent place in our culture. And while you might not be planning an invasion or negotiation with evil dictators or planning on launching an ugly automobile, chances are that Groupthink has show up from time to time in your professional world.

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The Problem(s) with Teams

May 28, 2010

It’s increasingly likely that you will spend a good deal of your professional time working on temporary teams. It’s also likely that you will experience a fair amount of frustration and even team failure along the way. Most organizations have yet to meet a problem (or opportunity) that they won’t throw a team at to solve. Let’s face it, it’s tempting to assume that a group of motivated, diverse individuals will trump the lone soldier when it comes to creativity, problem-solving and planning.

Or, at least it’s comfortable to think so.

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Leadership Caffeine™-5 Ideas for Improving Your Ability to Engage as a Leader

May 24, 2010

Some leaders move through their days like a flat rock skipping over the surface of a pond. They are focused on personal efficiency and speed, and the faster they move and the more decisions that they make, the better they believe they are doing as leaders. They are transactional leaders. Their days are blurs of decisions, quick meetings, hurried hallway exchanges and even more hurried text and e-mail messages, often created while they are present but not engaged in the event or conversation of the moment. If improving performance, fostering a culture of learning and innovation and developing the confidence to tackle the tough topics are all important for your firm, it’s time to engage more and transact less.

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Art to Help Kick-Off Project Leadership Forum at Harrisburg University

May 11, 2010

As a long-time, self-described zealot for the importance of project managers developing as leaders, imagine how excited I was to learn about a conference devoted to just this topic! I’ve written at length in this blog (Learning to Lead in the Project Focused World and others) and even offered up my e-book, Leadership and the Project Manager, in support of this concept. I’m even more excited to be a part of the conference as a guest keynote as Project Leadership Forum kicks-off on Thursday in Harrisburg, PA.

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Want Growth? You Might Try Slowing Down to Speed Up

May 5, 2010

Jocelyn R. Davis and Tom Atkinson offer some compelling thoughts on strategy in their article, “Need Speed? Slow Down,” in the May, 2010 Harvard Business Review. They describe the concept of strategic speed as one of reducing the time it takes to create value. While “reducing time” might sound like speeding up, their research results suggest the opposite.

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9 Tips for Nailing the Classroom Group Project Presentation

Apr 16, 2010

After sitting through a fair number of these presentations over the past few years, I’ve identified some common mistakes that detract from the quality of the final presentation and depress grades, not to mention instructors. The mistakes and misfires are generally a result of two issues: the very personal and irrational fear of presenting and some horrendously poor planning and coordination between group members.

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Leadership Caffeine™: Learning to Adjust Your Altitude

Apr 12, 2010

While the phrase is most commonly referenced as attitude adjustment, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that one of the abilities that leaders must develop to be effective is the ability to adjust their altitudes. Good leaders learn to scale institutional and intellectual heights with ease and comfort, quickly adapting to the audience and situation.

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Leadership Caffeine™-Teach Your Team to Make Better Decisions

Mar 14, 2010

If you were to embark upon a rugged and lonely journey to the top of the mountain to ask for enlightenment from the Oracle of Management, I suspect that you would be left with the words “decision-making” to ponder on your long walk back to civilization. And in spite of the lack of a concrete answer from this journey, I’ll throw in my two-cents worth that decision-making is in fact the essence of management. It’s also darned hard to do, difficult to teach and challenging to get right more often than not.

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