Moments
With
Marty

Do management teams actually become stale? Absolutely. High-performance is fragile. There’s a few reasons why teams sometimes lose their lustre.  The first is personalities. If you’re hiring really good people, you’ll have a bunch of rugged individualists, and there will be disagreements. When people are consumed by a drive for excellence, it can be tricky […]

I used to say that, with any team, nothing happens unless a leader makes it happen. But, to be more accurate, I now say that nothing different happens unless a leader makes it happen! A leader… that’s you, right!? To make any serious change requires a change of culture—the way we do things around here—and […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]