Moments
With
Marty

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 […]

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 […]

Before I start, I want to ask you a very small favor… please take a brief moment to hit the subscribe button for No Bullsh!t Leadership on your favorite podcast player. It helps us to reach even more leaders, and to fulfill our purpose of improving the quality of leaders globally. If you feel as […]

Communication is an incredibly important element of leadership. How you talk to your team, how you deliver a presentation when you’re in a room full of important people, and how well you connect one-on-one with your direct reports can all have a huge bearing on your performance, and your personal credibility. Knowing how to convey […]

Many of you probably wouldn’t know that I cut my leadership teeth on large software development projects as a project manager. And throughout my career, I’ve had executive or sponsorship accountability for large projects in construction, procurement, major asset overhaul, and capital efficiency. So, when I get to talk about projects, it’s like putting on […]

Being right Isn’t everything – it’s just a good start. I came up with this expression many years ago when I worked with an incredibly intelligent executive who struggled to get the outcomes she should have been able to easily achieve. She just couldn’t get buy-in from the people she led. Many leaders like to […]

Everyone thinks they know how to negotiate. Let’s face it, our negotiating skills are honed from birth, as we tussle with our parents to try to convince them to do what we want them to. We learn from a position of low power how to influence someone with greater power. Despite this, I learned a […]

More and more leaders are telling me that they’re totally burnt out. The factors behind the increasing levels of work stress are many and varied – burnout is a complex issue, and it’s become a really hot topic in the last couple of years. I’m pretty confident, though, that if you apply a couple of […]

Whatever you try to achieve as a leader relies, at least to some extent, on your credibility. If you have strong personal credibility, it makes everything you do inordinately easier. Credibility galvanizes your team… it instills confidence in the people above you… and it ultimately becomes an integral part of your leadership brand. Without it, […]

We’ve all sat in meeting rooms where we’ve been subjected to death by PPT. For every leader, the ability to present information in a compelling, interesting way is your basic table stakes: it should be a vital element of your core leadership competencies. The good news is, it’s never been easier to put together a […]