Moments
With
Marty

Virtually every company has natural tensions built into its DNA. For example, there’s the classic rub point between sales and operations… it’s easy to sell something, but then – your company has to deliver it. Sales people have a natural tendency to “over sell” a product, sometimes to the point where it’s almost impossible for […]

In these days of competitive labor markets, greater employee mobility, and increasing recruitment costs, our emphasis has to be on growing talent from within. This requires a razor sharp focus on performance, potential, and capability development. Sometimes, it’s best to bring someone in from outside (for example, when you need to lead a major performance […]

Many leaders use the word “value” with gay abandon… they say things like, “Come on, I want you all to add value”, or “We need to create value for our customers.” But for many of the people that this is designed to motivate and encourage, it’s almost meaningless. There’s no tangible way for them to […]

Before we get into today’s Moment, I just want to give a trigger warning… I’m going to use an expression that some people may find confronting or disturbing.  I thought about this carefully, and decided to go ahead, because I believe it needs to be this graphic to get the point across with impact. So, […]

In Ep.254, which we released about 18 months ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Scott J Miller. Scott is the host of FranklinCovey’s On Leadership podcast.  Over the 6 years that he’s been hosting On Leadership, Scott has interviewed some of the all-time greats in leadership, business, and life. He has interviewed household names […]

If I distilled the key things that helped me to grow rapidly over the years, what would they be?  I’ve often said that leaders are learners, but you could spend a lot of time consuming information, without necessarily getting traction: and by traction, I mean gaining the wisdom and insight that would differentiate you as […]

The proverbial high performing team has become a leadership cliché. I can’t count the number of leaders who claim to have built a high performing team (often, despite objective evidence to the contrary). But what if the culture of the organization that you’re leading in is actually a low performance culture? How would you know, […]

Collaboration is a critical ingredient for working successfully in complex organizations. But you should never sacrifice accountability in order to increase collaboration. When you don’t structure your team’s work program around single-point accountability, it’s hard to know who’s really doing what.  Accountabilities become more opaque, confused, and misunderstood… and performance suffers accordingly. From low-level, part-time […]

Most organizations have multiple layers of people. The largest organizations can have 6, or 7 or even 8 layers of leaders… and every layer is different. It has a unique purpose, and a unique time horizon that those leaders need to focus on. During my corporate executive career, not working at the right level was […]

Middle management jobs are often the toughest jobs in any organization. You are effectively the meat in the sandwich. You get pressure from above, and resistance from below… and sometimes it’s hard to work out which side you want to be on. This creates incredible dissonance, and it increases your stress levels, at times making […]