Leadership Caffeine Archives

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

Leadership Caffeine™: In Praise of Consistency

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.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:37:28-05:00September 19th, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|9 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: In Pursuit of Your Potential

You’re good, but do you have it in you to be great? I work with a lot of good professionals. These are smart people, all technically adept at their jobs and committed to working hard for their organizations. Only a few of these good individuals push themselves to become great.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:37:31-05:00September 12th, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|11 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™-Give Your People Room to Run

Overheard: “If I don’t stay on top of my people, nothing gets done.” If lousy leadership were a crime, the owner of the quote above might just merit a short stretch of quality alone-time to reflect on the implications of his statement. There are so many things truly wrong with the style of leadership that the statement connotes, that I’m not certain where to start. Here are 11 reminders that your job as a leader is to give people the room and tools to succeed.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:37:40-05:00August 23rd, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|25 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: Quit Managing Reduced Expectations

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.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:37:50-05:00August 10th, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|3 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: 4 Signs that Your Leadership Approach is Working

Most leaders struggle to understand whether they are helping or hindering the cause. Except of course for those leaders/narcissists who believe that their every utterance is sheer genius wrapped in pure motivational gold. The feedback from your manager, while important, tends to be based on either numbers or fairly casual observation. And feedback from your team members is welcomed, but you never really know for sure whether it’s the unvarnished type. The “Am I Helping?” issue is particularly important when a troubled team or organization gains a fresh leader. Here are 4 measures that will help you gauge whether you are truly helping or hindering:

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:37:56-05:00August 2nd, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|5 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: 6 Ideas to Improve Team Performance Today

If your organization is like most, you’re leaving money on the table in terms of team productivity and performance. Social and interpersonal factors, motivation issues, lack of group cohesion and the general up-front churn that teams display as they form, are just a few of the areas where you can pick up immediate productivity improvements with a little bit of smart leadership.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:38:21-05:00July 19th, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|2 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: Developing as a Senior Contributor

I regularly use the label “Senior Contributor” (SC) to reference a state of management maturity that tends to exist somewhere between upper mid-level management or senior knowledge worker and the executive layer. The SC is a professional (manager or individual contributor) on the brink of executive qualifications and someone that has displayed effective formal and informal leadership skills, value-creating critical and strategic thinking abilities, credible executive presence and a strong operating and quality orientation.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:38:25-05:00July 11th, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|2 Comments

Leadership Caffeine™: Gut Check on Your Intestinal Fortitude

Someone asked me the other day, whether there was one quality above all others that stuck out as essential for success as a leader? Without hesitating, I responded, “intestinal fortitude.” And while the question is not dissimilar to one of those impossible to answer but fun to speculate about debates that run endlessly on sports talk shows (e.g. Who was better, Aaron or Ruth?), I’m taking sides on this one.

By Art Petty|2024-08-08T13:38:29-05:00July 6th, 2010|1,770 Legacy Leadership Caffeine and Management Articles|19 Comments