Moments
With
Marty

Who are your high performers? I’m going to ask you that same question in a few minutes’ time, and see if you get the same answer! It’s surprisingly difficult to identify your high performers. Let me explain this with an example. I once had a client say to me, “Marty, I’ve got this high performer […]

You may have heard me talk about the leadership myth that “happy workers are productive workers”…  … conventional wisdom says that, if you want a team to perform, just keep your people happy! This, in turn will increase their engagement… which in turn will motivate them to perform. Bulls!t… Let’s look at this from the […]

A lot of people seem to think that the most certain way to build job security is to make themselves indispensable. But indispensability isn’t always a good thing.  It comes in two flavors, each of which are completely different. The first form of indispensability, which is generally desirable, is when you’re seen as someone who […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

Over the last several years, we’ve seen greater integration of our work and personal lives than ever before… some would even go so far as to say it’s unprecedented. It began a couple of decades ago, when innovations in telecommunications and mobile technology gave us the ability to be “online” no matter where we were. […]

Transformation can mean a lot of different things. Some leaders use it to describe any change they make in their organization that isn’t just BAU. This can be anything from a new IT system, to a cost cutting exercise, right through to a complete change in strategic direction. The word transformation implies a significant change… […]

As the world began to emerge from the Covid pandemic in early 2022, I released an episode about leading in the new remote work paradigm. During the pandemic, work became performance art for many, as they pursued the goal of looking busy, rather than actually delivering real, value-adding work. This wasn’t particularly new: there’s always […]

Hiring really good people has always been hard. Not only is there serious competition for talent in many industries, but there’s also a number of limitations that you may experience, through no fault of your own: your geographical footprint,your industry, and the public perception of your brand can all play a part in who you’re […]