Upsize Your Leadership

Picture eight rowers in a single boat. When they're out of sync, the boat doesn't just move slowly — it fights itself. But when they find their rhythm, the boat doesn't go a little faster. It leaps. That's the power of alignment, and it's the most underestimated source of speed in any organization. In this episode, Dr. Mike Armour makes the case that alignment doesn't simply add people's efforts t...

This is the third episode in a six-part series examining The Five Essentials of Leadership. It focuses on the second essential: cultivating high trust. Trust rests on credibility, which is a by-product of the first essential, Exemplifying Exceptional Character, the topic of our previous episode. The host Dr. Mike Armour approaches trust as much more than merely a moral virtue. It's is a strategic...

Great leadership begins long before strategy, trust, or culture — it begins with character. In this episode -- the second in our six-part series on the essentials of leadership -- we redefine character not as a list of virtues but as congruence: the full alignment of what you value, what you say, and what you do. Discover the two most dangerous "character gaps" — insincerity and inconsistency — an...

Exceptional leadership isn't about perfecting scores of different competencies. It's about understanding and implementing five fundamental principles. When they are developed sequentially and executed correctly, the result is a cascade of positive outcomes across your entire organization. This episode is the first in a series in which Mike introduce these five principles one-by-one. Together they...

In a business landscape defined by speed, disruption, and constant uncertainty, competitive advantage no longer goes to the biggest companies. It goes to the fastest. In this episode of Upsize Your Leadership, Dr. Mike Armour reveals why successful organizations must operate more like combat units trained for maneuver warfare than traditional corporate hierarchies. Drawing from decades of leadersh...

As a C-Suite leadership coach for nearly 30 years, I've watched the complexity of executive leadership steadily intensify. In this episode I trace the historical factors that led us to this state of affairs. I explore why today’s C‑Suite environment feels exponentially more complicated than anything leaders faced in previous generations. As I note in the episode, “You’re navigating complexity that...

In this episode, Dr. Mike Armour examines what he sees as a major miscalculation at the heart of the Trump Administration’s proposed peace plan for the Russia‑Ukraine war. Drawing on years of firsthand experience in both nations, he challenges a prevailing assumption in the U.S. negotiating strategy. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he managed widespread humanitarian efforts in both Rus...

In this episode Dr. Mike challenges conventional approaches to performance metrics by highlighting their limitations in a rapidly changing world. Using Nokia’s dramatic fall from market dominance as a cautionary tale, he arguex that traditional business scorecards often measure the wrong things—relying too heavily on past performance to forecast what lies ahead. KPIs and automated scorecards refle...

Building Trust Builds Customer Loyalty Research consistently confirms that customers will pay more for a product or service if they trust the provider. Companies should therefore cease on every opportunity to foster a climate in which trust can flourish. Customer loyalty never takes root where trust in a brand or company is low. And trust takes shape only in settings where ethics are held in high...

The Staggering Challenge of Rebuilding Ukraine For the first time in years, the possibility of peace in Ukraine is in the headlines. Ignored in most media coverage, however, is the immense complexity of getting the country back on its feet economically, industrially, and in terms of fundamental services. In this episode, I examine realities that are unknown by most Americans, but are momentous cha...

Five Essential Mindset Changes as You Climb the Management Ladder Have you known people with tremendous promise as managers or leaders whose careers got derailed and they never rose to the heights that they seemed destined for? No doubt you have. And as a leadership development coach, I’ve seen plenty of them. Of course, we could cite hosts of reasons why this happens. From what I’ve observed, fai...

Four Things that Pacesetting Leaders Get Right Our business world is not merely competitive. It's hypercompetitive. Run-of-the-mill performance is no longer acceptable. To stay ahead, companies need leaders who build and maintain sustained high performance. Over two decades ago, I began studying leaders who had done that very thing. I started to identify common denominators in organizations – both...

A Supreme Court Decision That Changed Nothing The Future of the Beneficial Ownership Information Report Remains Uncertain After bouncing around in district and appeals courts for months, the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) and its mandated Beneficial Ownership Information Report had their first day before the Supreme Court this month. On January 23, the Court lifted a temporary restraining order...

What Managers Should Always Remember About Their People One of the shortcomings of modern accounting systems is that they have no mechanism for showing the capability and dedication of your workforce as an asset on a balance sheet. Workers appear only as liabilities: payrolls due, cost of benefits, Social Security obligations, etc. Yet workers are the manager's most valuable asset. That's one of s...

Five Ways Managers Can Combat Distrust in the Workplace Recent studies confirm that worker distrust of the company and its managers is solidly entrenched. These studies found that fewer than half of employees trust their manager. And only one in three trusts upper management. In today's episode I examine some historic roots of this distrust. It gained its foothold in the business and corporate wor...

Beneficial Ownership Information Report The Latest Legal Maneuvers As I predicted in my podcast two weeks ago, the court challenge to the Beneficial Ownership Information Report has now made its way to the steps of the Supreme Court. At the time of my previous podcast regarding this case, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had given assent to a nationwide temporary restraining order on the Corpora...

Why I Quit Asking People for Buy-In Here's What I Want Instead I've dropped "buy-in" from my leadership vocabulary. I guess I've led to many initiatives where people "bought in," but never became engaged. We all buy into great causes, but never become actively involved. For example, everyone buys into the value of ending world hunger. But only a few ever take up the fight personally. Both within o...

Beginning shortly after Thanksgiving, I've been on a roller coaster ride, along with the owners of about 37 million other small businesses in the U.S. Constitutional challenges to the Corporate Transparency Act have been making their way through the court system. In rapid-fire fashion judicial decisions have been made, then reversed, followed in short order by a reversal of the reversal. The resul...

Tales from a Total Solar Eclipse in Siberia Two Very Funny Stories I live just north of Dallas, so we are in the direct path of this month's complete solar eclipse. It's all the buzz around here. I'm sure that the event will spin off lots of personal stories as people relate what happened around them during the eclipse. But I doubt that any of these stories will top two of mine from my last total...

War in Ukraine: What the Final Outcome May Look Like Now that the spring thaw has begun in Ukraine, the year's most intense season of combat is about to start. How will this war end? It's almost anyone's guess. But whatever the outcome, it will be shaped by the influence of the backstories which we've focused on in the last three podcasts. With this episode, we bring the series to a conclusion by...

Russian Perspectives on the War The Historical Backdrop This is the third program in a four-part series examining historical and cultural factors which shape the backdrop against which the war in Ukraine is playing out. Having devoted the first two programs to Ukrainian perspectives, in this one we shift to how Russia views both the war and Ukrainians themselves. For reasons which I explain in thi...

Ukraine's Newfound Patriotic Zeal An Unintended Gift from Putin It's clear that neither Vladimir Putin nor his war planners ever anticipated the strength and the tenacity of Ukraine's resistance to the Russian invasion. A war which the Russians expected to last a few hours or days has now entered its third year, and Russian offensives have been stymied month after month. What explains this Ukraini...

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, I worked extensively in both Russia and Ukraine. I managed offices and staffs in both countries and interacted closely with everyone from the most common laborers to top government officials. Not only that, my duties required me to travel widely in Russia and from corner to corner of Ukraine. I became intimately acquainted with how Ukrainians feel about...

The Action Agenda for Every Leader This is the fourth episode in a series examining the meaning of leadership. Previous programs explored the people-centric nature of leadership and the orchestrating role of purpose at the heart of the leader's endeavor. This final episode in the series examines the three-part action agenda which every leader must carry out. First is to rally people around the pur...

How We Developed a Muddled Concept of Leadership In my early 20s, when I began conducting trainings on leadership, few books on the subject existed. The business world was somewhat exclusive enthralled with management, and that was reflected in the inventory choices at the typical bookstore. It would be another 20 years before Warren Bemis and others began publishing works which drew a sharp disti...