Leadership Caffeine Archives

Leadership Caffeine™: How to Cope With Organizational Alchemists

The modern-day practice of alchemy is only metaphorically about the search for a method to turn lead into gold. Instead of the medieval pursuit by alchemists of a magical chemical conversion process to change one element into another, modern practitioners are focused on the magical and easy transformation of people and organizations from one level of performance to another. Here are 12 questions to help you keep the alchemists in check.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:36:13-05:00January 3rd, 2011|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|4 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: How to Appropriately Respond to Positive Praise

It’s easy to start believing the praise you hear in the hallways about your leadership approach. Easy and dangerous. I’ve always been leery of the unfounded and saccharine-sweet praise that is bestowed upon leaders. While you may call me cynical, I prefer to think of myself as pragmatic. Here are five ideas for appropriately responding to positive praise:

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:36:22-05:00December 13th, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|16 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: How to Grow Your Leadership Credibility in 15 Easy Lessons

Like good health, you cannot have too much credibility as a leader. You build credibility as a leader one interaction and one decision at a time over a long period of time. Here are 15 suggestions to help build your leadership credibility.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:36:30-05:00November 28th, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|10 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: Mistakes are the Raw Ingredients of Leadership Courage

’ve made a number of mistakes over the course of my leadership career that make my head spin and my stomach turn just thinking about them. No life or death or business impacting mistakes, but, definitely some people and team impacting issues that created ill will and most definitely didn’t show me off at my leadership best. Learning from those mistakes helped me evolve my thinking on the role of a leader and on my true priorities in supporting my business, my peers and my team members.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:36:33-05:00November 21st, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|9 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: The “I’s” Have It

The short, important and seemingly harmless word, "I," is a potentially lethal weapon of morale and credibility destruction when used for evil or ego instead of for good. It’s so powerful in fact, that I envision a future world where leaders wear the equivalent of a dosimeter badge to warn leader and followers when the use of "I" is in danger of creating a toxic event…most likely a spillover of b.s. into the workplace.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:37:07-05:00November 15th, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|12 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: Managing Risk Without Stifling Experimentation

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.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:37:10-05:00November 8th, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|14 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: Learning to Ask for Help

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.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:37:15-05:00November 1st, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|11 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™-Stuck in a Rut? Try These Ideas On for Size

There’s an awful bad case of the “serious” malady running through our society right now, and for just a moment, we all deserve to unclench our jaws, breathe and even form that rare but powerful facial expression, the smile. Consider this my attempt (albeit a weak one, I’m certain) to take a little of the seriousness out of your day while offering ideas that might just have something to them. Or, they might not, but, I’ll leave that for you to judge.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:37:18-05:00October 25th, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|6 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: Strengthen as a Leader by Developing as a Follower

I grew up to the refrain of “be a leader, not a follower,” and the drive to lead is part of who I am. Part and parcel of that has been a natural resistance through much of my early career to the notion that, “to be a good leader, you need to be a good follower.” For me, and I know for many others, our ambition is to drive change, right wrongs and challenge the status quo and to advance. Mentally, it’s hard to connect those core professional drives with the passive and even weak sounding notion of “following.”

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:37:21-05:00October 18th, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|10 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: Let Your Questions Be Their Guide

The art of asking questions is a leadership power tool. A good question from a leader is like a pebble thrown into a pond. While the splash occurs at the impact point, the question encourages people to think experiment and even innovate, long after the initial asking.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:37:25-05:00September 27th, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|9 Comments