Moments
With
Marty

Blaming others when something doesn’t go to plan is one of the most insidious (and unfortunately, most common) leadership behaviors. It’s a cancer in your culture that has to be eradicated.  When a leader tolerates the blame game, excuses become the norm, and organizational politics thrives.  I came to believe over time that excuses are […]

One of the most important roles that a leader plays is to set the right standards for performance and behavior that the team is expected to rise to. Sometimes, we think we’re setting an appropriately high performance standard but the exceptions we make indicate otherwise. How do you actually set the standard? Now, I’m talking […]

This post is inspired by an article that Denise Lee Yohn had published in Harvard Business Review in 2018. And, I defy anyone to read that headline and not feel compelled to read the article. Yohn drew on research from hundreds of companies, finding that 90% of all corporate values statements have the words “ethical” […]

If it was easy to build a diverse organization, everyone would have already done it. There’s a couple of limiting factors that I’ve learned from experience make this an incredibly difficult pursuit. The first thing is that disadvantage is historical. When you’re trying to fix historical anomalies, the people who are already in the senior […]

Many leaders claim to have built high-performing teams. Many of them are completely full of shit… and in my experience, most can’t even clearly articulate what a high-performing team is! If you want to build a high-performing team—I mean, really want to build a high performing team—then there’s going to be some pretty tough leadership […]

Is leading from the front a good thing? Well, the short answer is yes, but it comes with one major caveat. I’ve seen many leaders doing the work of people below them and then painting this as a virtue by saying, “I’m leading from the front.” This concept is completely flawed, and it’s a dangerous […]

I’ve seen the devastating effects of laissez-faire leaders. They seem to think that if you keep people happy, they’ll naturally give you their best work. In my experience, this is almost never the case. You’ll recognize a permissive or weak leader because they’ll verbalize it in some pretty standard ways. Just make a little note […]

We sometimes forget what the true purpose of leadership is. It’s not to entertain your people during their working hours, and it’s not to focus on helping them to live their best lives. The higher up you go in any organization, the less you can achieve yourself, and the more you need to rely on […]

Great leaders set an appropriate decision-making culture. People need to know, for a start, that robust challenge is expected and rewarded, not frowned upon and suppressed. You have to be able to challenge each other, and the people around you need to be able to challenge you as a decision-maker, if you want to bring […]

What is busy work? As the name would suggest, it’s activity that keeps you occupied, but doesn’t necessarily create value. It’s justifiable to anyone who happens to ask, based purely on the hours of effort it consumes. Busy work often has formal authority behind it. For example, you may be bound to follow a process […]