No Bullsh!t Leadership

Episode #117 // Every organisation inherently has a number of natural tensions between different groups and functions - finance vs marketing; sales vs operations; operations vs asset management; IT and… virtually everyone! Rather than trying to eliminate these tensions, leaders should concentrate on using them to get better outcomes. It’s through nurturing and managing natural tensions that you’ll...

Episode #116 // We tend to talk a lot about how important it is for leaders to give their people feedback, but focus much less on how to receive feedback.  In this episode, we turn the tables a little. All great leaders were first great followers, and had to experience how life felt on the other side of the table. Listening and learning should never stop, no matter how high up you go. We look...

Episode #115 // Innovation has become a very overused term, which can be found in the bullsh!t bingo dictionary between agility , and strategic . The term has become so hackneyed that it can sometimes be almost meaningless.  In this episode, I strip away some of the mystique around innovation, and offer some practical guidelines for managing the innovation process in your organisation. The va...

Episode #114 // Starting a new role can be a little daunting, whether you’re being promoted to lead the team you used to be part of, or moving to a completely different organisation in a new industry. Every new role requires you to go through a deliberate process to set yourself up, and to establish the right expectations with your stakeholders - your boss, your peers, your team and, depending on...

Episode #113 // In the last couple of decades, we’ve seen an increasing focus on embracing diversity. The emphasis on this is often limited to gender diversity, as we look to achieve increased representation of women in senior leadership positions. But even though gender is clearly a priority area, diversity needs to go way further if we truly want to achieve better outcomes. There are two distinc...

Episode #112 // We get an enormous number of questions on making better decisions, but we haven’t really addressed this subject directly in quite a while. Ultimately your ability to make better decisions, faster than your competitors provides the foundation for execution excellence. In this week’s episode, we go back to Q&A format, where Em and I pick up a couple of questions from our podcast...

Episode #111 // If you took a poll of 100 leaders, you’d be hard-pressed to find one who’d say that they’d like more meetings in their lives, especially these days where 'Zoom fatigue' has become a factor. However, meetings can be a powerful construct for setting standards, making decisions, and lifting performance. If you're spending a lot of your time in meetings, you want to make them count! In...

Episode #110 // We all get busy doing the things we do in life, and sometimes we don’t really think about what we’re actually achieving. Some people love to be in the thick of things, happy to risk success or failure. Others appear to be much more comfortable watching from the sidelines, at a safe distance. Unless you learn how to put yourself “in the arena”, you’ll struggle to find success and sa...

Episode #109 // The concept of “Servant Leadership” was first formulated by Robert Geenleaf 50 years ago, most likely as a reaction to the command-and-control leadership style of corporate America in the 1950s and 1960s. Servant Leadership has a lot going for it. Putting the focus on the growth and well-being of the individual, and using this as a means to achieve organisational outcomes is indeed...

Episode #108 // This episode takes a look at the delicate issue of relationships at work. Why do we still see a revolving door of very senior executives exiting organisations at incredible personal, financial, and reputational cost? Cultural standards and policies vary wildly from organisation to organisation and, let’s face it, around 1 in 5 of you actually met your current partner at work. But w...

Episode #107 // The amount of disruption, challenge, and uncertainty we’ve dealt with in the past six months has tested us all. Who is committed to coming out the other side better for the experience? This episode illuminates the road to true resilience, as we tap into the experiences of those who’ve come before us. How do we cope when everything appears hopeless, and the barriers seem insurmounta...

Episode #106 // In this episode, we take a look at part of a mentoring session I did with a fantastic young leader named Kate. Kate is a leader in a financial services company that supports a major global manufacturer. We covered a lot of ground in the session, so I actually found it really difficult to select the most valuable piece. But the dialogue I liked best, is the part about enabling peopl...

Episode #105 // Sometimes, you come into a new leadership role where the team you take over is broken. This happens with surprising regularity. Why? Because there’s a strong correlation between poor culture, poor performance, and poor leadership. We know that great leaders are in short supply, and the role models we look towards don’t necessarily show us how to improve. So how do you pick up the p...

Episode #104 // Leaders often struggle with their workload, as they move to more senior levels in an organisation. Hard work is a given if you want to be successful in any field, and I certainly wouldn’t make a case for trying to avoid any of that hard work…it builds resilience and character. However, it’s sad to see people become myopically focused on work, to the exclusion and detriment of every...

Episode #103 // We’ve had lots of questions lately from listeners asking how to implement the learnings from the podcast into their organizations, and to get their leaders to pick up on the concepts and actually use them! Unfortunately there are no simple answers to this question. The podcast is designed for leaders like you, to expose you to different ways of thinking, and to give you some practi...

Episode #102 // It’s no surprise that leaders increasingly fall into the trap of acting only for short-term results, not really considering what they leave behind in the longer term. This trend seems to have accelerated with the instant availability of information (both true and fabricated). Do leaders ever think of their legacy after their postings? Do most even care? The issues that drive leader...

Episode #101 // What keeps your people engaged, motivated, and committed? This week, we explore the world of talent retention. Staff turnover is expensive, but it’s not always undesirable. How do you keep the people you want, and turn over the ones you don’t? Obviously, if you get the right people on the team in the first place, life’s a lot easier. And if you pay them enough, you can actually tak...

Episode #100 // Today, we’re going to take a quick breather from our normal content, and talk about all things Your CEO Mentor related to celebrate our 100th episode! In this episode, Em and I talk about our first two years of operation, and our bold plans for the future. Em will tell the story of how she actually convinced me to set up Your CEO Mentor with her in the first place, and we’re going...

Episode #99 // How would you know if you’ve reached your use-by date in a role? Great organisations rise and fall - very few stand the test of time. What’s the connection between the executives that run these exceptional businesses, and their eventual demise? In this episode, we look at some of the reasons for organisational failure and why, individually, we tend to lose our effectiveness over tim...

Episode #98 // There have been a couple of questions that we’ve seen appearing as common themes over the past few months, so Em and I thought we’d tackle them today in a Q&A! First, we answer a question from Dave, who asked about effective delegation: “How, why, and when should you delegate, and how do you ensure outcomes are achieved?” This is a common question that cuts across many of the th...

Episode #97 // Many people suffer from addictions, and they don’t check them in at the door when they turn up to work each day - their choice is to either function through their dysfunction, or lose their job. How should we, as leaders, handle incidences of addiction in our people? What are the boundaries we should maintain, and how much slack should we cut people who suffer from these issues? We...

Episode #96 // As we’ve just hit the end of the Australian 2020 Financial Year, a lot of our local listeners are about to step into the performance review cycle, and go through the gruelling schedule of meetings, documentation, and feedback. Episode #96 // This episode examines the trend of major companies going away from the annual performance review process, and replacing it with regular, timely...

Episode #95 // What should we outsource, when should we outsource, and how do we avoid the common pitfalls? In the 90’s, outsourcing became all the rage, particularly in the IT world. But the principles behind it go back to the economic theory of comparative advantage , first proposed by David Ricardo over 200 years ago, in the early 19th century. We explore some critical questions in this episode...

Episode #94 // This episode is another value-packed live mentoring session with two of our past Leadership Beyond the Theory students, Leina Broughton and Fleur Richardson. Leina is an Australian fashion designer and entrepreneur who, with her business partner Fleur, has brought the Leina Broughton label to market. We’ve taken the two topics from this session that we think are most relevant to the...

Episode #93 // Through the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen some stark examples of leadership in crisis, both good and bad, as countries have tried to come to terms with the pandemic, and the impacts on their people and economies. Some leaders have fared better than others. This episode looks at some of the misconceptions about what constitutes good leadership (hint: look at the res...