Let’s Rethink Summer School—A Program for Motivated Managers
The Summer School for Managers program offers a low-stress opportunity to sharpen your skills, network with some great people, and do it from wherever your travels take you.
The Culture, Strategy, and Performance Killing Spiral of Poor or No Feedback
While we regularly focus on feedback as an individual performance tool, it's also a critical communication tool for driving improvement across groups and for processes and initiatives. Yet, this important, honest communication is in short supply in too many organizations.
Leadership Caffeine™—”This Is the Way It Should Be”
Teaming and collaboration experiences happen in all walks of our professional and personal lives. Some experiences working with others are draining, others passable, and just a few are energizing and even fun and successful. You can hope these fun, productive experiences emerge by chance. Or you can be deliberate about creating the conditions that improve the possibility of a great collaboration experience. I opt for improving our odds of bringing one of these productive, fun experiences to life. Here are four ideas to help:
Leadership Caffeine Podcast #32—Marc Effron
This is the single best discussion I've ever had on pursuing high-performance as an individual! I can't say enough good about my interview with Marc Effron and the science-backed content in his new book, 8 Steps to High Performance: Focus on What You Can Change (Ignore the Rest).
Leadership Caffeine™—Success: It’s All in the Cause
It's not hard to identify the ingredients essential for success on a team or in an organization. Yet, manifesting a group wildly motivated to succeed is the real issue. To do this, there must be a cause that serves as the catalyst and driver. Your numbers, goals, quarterly targets, and emotional or logical pleas aren't enough. The right cause brings teams to life.
For Managers—The Performance Potential of a Strong Feedback Culture
Imagine there was a tool at your disposal that would help reinforce in real-time the behaviors of group members that moved the performance numbers in the right direction. Or, a tool that would get people motivated to learn, grow, and leave behind less-than-ideal behaviors in favor of new approaches and continuous improvement. Wouldn’t this be helpful? Well, there is. It’s called performance feedback. And sadly, it’s often missing-in-action, misapplied, or, applied inconsistently, and that’s just leaving money and morale on the table.
Few Do-Overs in Leadership, Instead, Do-Different
Unfortunately, do-overs in leadership are rare. Instead, work on rebuilding your leadership foundation mid-flight by using these three big ideas with your team.
Commanding Excellence with Gary Morton: Purpose, Obsession, and Creativity
Gary Morton, author of Commanding Excellence: Inspiring Purpose, Passion, and Ingenuity through Leadership that Matters, shares his wisdom and experiences in this wide-ranging interview with Management Excellence and Leadership Caffeine author, Art Petty.
Leadership Caffeine™—“It’s Not What You Preach, it’s What You Tolerate”
The book, "Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win," is one of the latest additions to the growing number of books from the ranks of the warrior heroes known as Navy SEALs. This one is a keeper, with powerful lessons drawn from life or death experiences. While our workplace challenges are mild by comparison, the leadership lessons are a perfect fit for anyone accountable for the results of others.
Art of Managing—The Pursuit of Excellence is a Choice
Too few managers and management teams talk about what it means to promote a culture of business performance excellence in and across their organizations. Even fewer work on it.
