Moments
With
Marty

I often hear leaders talk about their stakeholders, but I don’t always get the sense that they have clarity around who their stakeholders are and, more importantly, what each of them expects. This is why it’s critical to map your stakeholders… you need to know who they are, and what drives each of them. For […]

It’s easy to reduce the process of learning from your mistakes to a few pithy sayings: “Failure is another stepping stone to greatness” “When we give ourselves permission to fail, we also give ourselves permission to excel.” “Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly!” “I never fail — I either succeed, or I […]

One of the most common reasons that people give for resigning from their job, is that they can’t work for their boss.  We know, from our personal experience, that there isn’t an oversupply of great leaders out there… so, rather than job-hopping every 6 months, we settle for the boss we’ve got, and try 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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

According to the Urban Dictionary, a Captain’s Call is a decision made unilaterally by a team leader without consulting colleagues, often resulting in a massive CF, which, to be clear, is an acronym representing two words – first word, “cluster” In the majority of cases, these Captain’s Calls are seen by team members as being […]

You’ve probably heard me say that, for all the complexities and nuances of human interaction, people’s needs are pretty simple. They want to know three things when they come into work each day: What are your expectations of me? How am I performing against those expectations? and What does my future hold? As a leader, […]