Upsize Your Leadership

Accountability Seems to Be in Retreat In the previous two episodes, I've discussed a variety of factors which produced a broad-based perception that personal accountability is greatly diminished. In the last episode, I looked at three cultural trends which have aggravated this decline. These are: side-effects of family breakdown growth of a victim mentality massive urbanization Today I examine thr...

Diminished Personal Accountability: Contributing Factors to a Growing Issue Everywhere I go, it seems, I hear people expressing dismay at what they see as a decaying sense of personal accountability in American culture. Many factors contribute to the decline. This episode is the second in a multipart series which analyzes these factors from historical, sociological, and psychological standpoints....

Is Accountability in Dwindling Supply? I overhear more and more conversations of late about accountability. Most of these are discussions of what people perceive as an increasing lack of personal accountability in our culture. After listeners began urging me to speak to this issue, I decided to give the subject more than a single episode. Instead, I'm planning a series of programs on the topic. Th...

No nation has ever been as entrepreneurial as the United States. More people in the U.S. aspire to be entrepreneurs than anywhere else on earth. Far more people take a stab at being an entrepreneur than succeed at it. The failure rate is staggering. And a primary reason for failure is the lack of an entrepreneurial mindset. People are attracted to an entrepreneurial career because they see the att...

Leadership and the Power of Trust A (New) Best-Seller Evidence is everywhere that trust is in low repair in our nation. Polarization is deep, and it touches almost every field of human endeavor and opinion. For almost 20 years, Dr. Mike Armour has been addressing our world's growing problem and how it impacts the world of business leadership. His 2006 book, Leadership and the Power of Trust, has b...

The Vital Role of Second-Tier Leadership Sometimes we call them the "number two" person in the organizations. Sometimes we jokingly refer to them as the "second banana." They are those people who are positioned just below the top leader on the organization chart. Often they are in that slot because they are being groomed for the top position some day. A great many, however, like that post for an e...

A Stark Contrast in Leadership Styles At the outset of the war in Ukraine, I produced two podcasts in which I forecast some things about the conflict which would surprise the world. I based my predictions on years of experience managing offices and distribution centers in both Russia and Ukraine. Since then, events have unfolded much along the lines of what I anticipated. What no one foresaw, howe...

Not everything that is called "innovation" deserves the title. I frequently hear things referred to as innovations, when in reality they seem to be more nearly a singular instance of ingenuity, improvisation, or inventiveness. Marketing has served to blur the distinct nature of innovation. It constantly bombards us with announcements of some "new and innovative product." As a result, we have come...

What Kind of Corporate Culture Is Your Leadership Perpetuating? Wherever humans begin a protracted association, a culture automatically emerges. In fairly short order, some things will be valued, Others will not. Unwritten rules will begin to govern the way things are done within the group. The result is a de facto culture, that is, one which was not purposefully promoted. It simply evolved by cha...

For Leaders, Every Day Is Showtime Just like a performer on stage, leaders are under the ever-watchful eye of an audience, The audience constantly makes judgments about the leader's performance based on what the leader says and does. In effect, leaders step on stage every morning. They should begin the day, therefore, with the outlook of an actor or actress in their dressing room, making preparati...

Reputation and Trust Rise and Fall Together A leader's effectiveness turns on trust. Trust is the confident expectation that a person will consistently do what is right in every situation. How well a leader lives up to that expectation determines his or her reputation as a leader. In essence, the trust which people put in a leader rises and falls in tandem with the leader's reputation. Strong, pos...

A Culture of Trust Requires First a Culture of Truth As an essential for building trust in our leadership, truth ranks second only to integrity. Integrity of course, implies telling the truth. But the kind of truth which builds a culture of trust goes beyond the simple, but sometimes difficult task of being honest in what we say. To build genuine, effective trust we must be equally willing to hear...

Your Three Choices In the Wake of Failure The Choice that Makes for a More Resourceful Future Nothing says more about a leader's character than the way he or she responds to wholesale failure. Is the first impulse to make excuses for what happened? To find someone to blame for the failure? Or is it to learn from the failure so that we are more resourceful in the future? As leaders, we are charged...

Feedback That Fosters Learning and Development The ultimate purpose of feedback is to optimize performance. Ideally, therefore, feedback is a learning experience. This means that in delivering feedback, managers should avoid any wording or tonality which would invite a defensive reaction. Defensiveness upends any learning potential in the conversation. This episode, the second in a two-part series...

Far too often feedback is done poorly, too infrequently, or not at all. This is the first of a two-part series on providing feedback that is timely, actionable, and motivational. But first we address some misconceptions. We explain why there is no such thing as "negative feedback." We also delve into why the "sandwich" approach to feedback does not work. Then we outline specific, concrete steps fo...

This episode breaks with my typical focus on leadership per se. Instead, I take a look at the socio-political backdrop against which American leaders do their work today. I begin with one of my favorite quotes from the famed humorist, Will Rogers. He was one of the first Americans to visit Russia after the Communist takeover. On his return, the press asked him about his impression of the USSR. He...

Work-Family Life Balance A Uniquely Modern Challenge The challenge of maintaining balance between work and family life is not a new concern. But it is a distinctly modern one. For most of man's time on the planet, work and family life were so integrated that there was no clear line of demarcation between them. Think about American life in the 19th century. The vast majority of people lived in rura...

Sneaky Beliefs That Limit Your Sense of Possibility It's rare for our performance to transcend what we believe is possible for us. Leaders must therefore commit themselves to enlarging their sense of possibility -- possibility both for themselves and for their people. Our sense of possibility, however, can never exceed what we believe to be true about ourselves and about those whom we lead. Knowin...

The Organizational Culture War Playing Out in Ukraine There is a war within a war on the battlefields of Ukraine. It's a cultural war. Not a war of Ukrainian culture versus Russian culture so much as a war between organizational culture. On one hand are the Russians, who have maintained the authoritarian leadership inherited from their Soviet past, which in turn inherited it from the czars. By con...

Managing Paradox as a Leader You've probably never heard of paradox management. Management texts rarely mention it. But within every corporate culture, certain paradoxes are at work. And this is equally true in all corporate cultures, whether in the profit or non-profit sector. In these cultural paradoxes, leaders are confronted with two choices which seem to be mutually exclusive. Doing one precl...

I've used the last two podcasts to explore little-known factors which account for the effectiveness with which the Ukrainians are standing up to the Russian invasion. Today I look at the ingenuity of the Ukrainians in finding and exploiting weak spots in the way the Russian forces are conducting their offensive. What is now becoming apparent is that the Ukrainians are demonstrating an amazing abil...

Charred buildings and massive piles of rubble are becoming commonplace in Ukraine as Russia unleashes its a campaign of annihilation might against the entire Ukrainian population. Yet, Ukrainian resistance seems undeterred. What does the future hold? This episode delves into that question by examining the prospects for Ukraine if Russia wins and Ukraine's defenders are reduced to an insurgency mov...

Because of Russia's recent invasion, Ukraine has been dominating the news cycle. But most Americans know little, if anything, about this little-known country, even though it is the largest nation whose borders fall entirely in Europe. In this episode, I draw on years of firsthand, on-the-ground experience in Ukraine to give you an important backstory to the current events in Ukraine. It's the back...

Ours is a performance driven world, especially for managers and executives.. They feel the constant pressure to hit critical numbers in terms of production and profits. To meet those expectations, they are continually tweaking their own performance and the performance of their team. In this episode we examine the basic principle of performance enhancement advanced 40 years ago by Timothy Gallwey i...

It's All About Planning, Not the Plan General Dwight David Eisenhower is famously known for having said that in preparation for battle, plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. These words from the man who planned the largest operation ever undertaken in human history, the D-Day landing at Normandy. What we learn during a thorough learning process, Eisenhower knew, is far more valuable fo...