Moments
With
Marty

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 […]

Whenever you need approval for resources, or to commence a program of work, you’ll most likely need to convince your boss that it’s a good idea. As a CIO and finance executive, and later as a CEO, I assessed hundreds of investment proposals, and I made decisions based upon whether or not the business cases […]

You’ve no doubt heard the expression, Employee Engagement. It’s roughly equivalent to the age-old concept of job satisfaction, or JSAT. The big question is, does increased employee engagement improve performance? It sounds like it should be true – as long as you believe that happy workers are productive workers. Unfortunately, I don’t! Most often, happy […]

There’s so much talk these days about purpose… kids at a very young age seem to be indoctrinated with the notion that if you don’t pursue your purpose, you’re somehow lesser… or that what you choose to do has no meaning or value. This is complete bullsh!t I didn’t find my true purpose until I […]

We all have an idea of what the term “character” means, but you may find it hard to put into words… and, if you actually get a number of people to explain what they think it is, you’ll find that everyone’s definition is different.  It’s likely to include concepts like: Trustworthiness Respect  Fairness Caring  Resilience […]

When you get promoted, you may have a reasonable expectation that your boss will spend time with you to induct you, to explain what’s important in your new role, and to walk you through the nuances of the transition. If this has happened to you at any point during your career, you should send me […]