Upsize Your Leadership

Crisis Leadership in the Face of the Corona Pandemic The corona virus pandemic calls for exceptional leadership both globally and at every level of society. This is by no means the worst crisis mankind has faced. But it is no doubt the most extensive. Great leaders emerge in times of great crisis, especially prolonged ones. In such moments these leaders have historically pursued five time-proven p...

How Non-Profit Leadership Differs In many ways, leading a non-profit is more challenging than leadership in the for-profit realm. Because non-profits are so dependent on volunteer workers, the leader must have exceptional skills in engaging people and motivating them. To accomplish this motivational task, non-profit leaders must be able to draw people to their organization by articulating a distin...

Leadership Development Done the BNSF Way Shortly after the turn of the century, under the leadership of CEO Matt Rose, BNSF Railway initiated a comprehensive leadership development program. Among other things, it provided exceptional mentoring experiences for emerging leaders across the company. At the heart of this effort was what BNSF calls its Leadership Model. The model centers on five princip...

What Values Actually Steer Your Corporate Culture? A basic tenet of leadership is to define the primary values which should guide your organization. These are the values which we espouse. But are they necessarily the values the organization embodies? What's often the case is that an organization has a set of espoused values which are posted prominently and listed in employee handbooks. But the val...

The High-Performance Molecule for Team-Building For leaders who want to develop a high-performing team, here's a template to work from. I call the template the High-Performance Molecule, because my graphic representation of it resembles a molecule. I structure this molecule around five essentials for any team which wants to perform at an exceptional level. If one or more of these elements is weak...

Do You Want a High-Performing Team? Andrew Carnegie once described teamwork as "the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results." As a manager or leader, your own success is either limited or expanded by the performance of your team. It therefore behooves you to build a team which is uncompromising in its commitment to high performance. But what does high performance mean, exactly? T...

How Satisfied Are Your Workers with their Second Paycheck? Studies have repeatedly shown that intrinsic motivations, not extrinsic ones, are the longest lasting in their impact. With an appropriate intrinsic paycheck, people often stay with an organization long after they have concluded that their extrinsic paycheck -- salary, bonuses, benefits, etc. -- is too small. This episode looks at five int...

Consensus-Building: A Constant Challenge for Leaders Among other things, leaders are consensus builders. That’s part of their mandate to unite people around a course of action. Achieving consensus is not always an easy task. There are countless ways in which a leader’s effort at consensus-building can be blocked. In this episode I lay out seven time-proven principles which leaders should keep in m...

Gratitude Safeguards Good Leadership What are the most important leadership traits? Opinions on the subject are found in dozens of lists. But few of them include gratitude, which is unfortunate. Gratitude is the foundation for many vital attitudes and outlooks which make for great leadership. Gratitude promotes optimism, humility, and openness to others. It safeguards against resentment and bitter...

Leaders Who Coach With the rise of empowerment styles of leadership, companies increasingly expect those who lead or manage to coach and mentor their people. Over the past 20 years I've helped a number of companies establish internal coaching or mentoring programs. And for several semesters I taught an MBA course on coaching skills for managers. In this episode I offer an overview of how this emph...

Leaders must fully understand the distinction between conversation and communication., Because leadership is so interpersonal in nature, almost everything a leader does involves communication, either directly or indirectly. This episode lays the foundation for understanding what truly constitutes communication. It examines four communication processes and analyzes seven levels of communication. Do...

In day-to-day conversation, "extravert" and "introvert" are used in ways which do not accord with their strict psychological definition. Leaders and managers need to understand the genuine meaning of extraversion and introversion if they are to bring out the best in their people. In this program Dr. Mike examines both the popular meaning of these words and their psychological meaning, then explore...

Motivation is rooted in values. We are not motivated to do something which has no value to us. Leaders must understand their people's values well enough to build motivation and inspiration off of them. Equally important, leaders must understand how what people believe about a given value determines  the principles they will use to implement that value. This episode looks at what Dr. Mike calls the...

How much time do you spend every day in personal self-development? Do you make the excuse that your schedule is too full to make time for daily self-enrichment? Interestingly, some of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the world -- people with unbelievably busy schedules -- devote two or three hours each day to expanding their knowledge and know-how. They are true lifelong learners. This episode look...

Like everyone else, leaders have a life purpose, a unique calling. When they can uncover that purpose and orchestrate their leadership around it, they position themselves for levels of personal fulfillment not otherwise possible. In this episode Mike offers practical exercises for identifying the underlying purpose of our lives and utilizing that knowledge as leaders. A transcript of this podcast...

We are born with personality. Character must be developed. And the quality of our character and our strength of character determine up to 85% of our success as leaders. Repeated studies over several decades have reached this conclusion. In this episode we explore the linkage between character and leadership success. We examine the difference between personality and character and show why consisten...

Historically, the concept of leadership began on ancient battlefields, where the leader had to be courageous, above all else. Courage is still the most vital leadership trait. Successful leaders, even those who are not particularly virtuous, must have the virtue of courage to attain their goals. This episode explores why leadership courage is essential, not just for those in life-or-death settings...

The fastest way for leaders to lose influence is to have their integrity called into question. Personal integrity is a paramount leadership virtue. Unlike other leadership traits, integrity cannot be faked. The very pretense of faking it obliterates it. This episode examines the true meaning of integrity and the role of integrity in building trusted leadership. Download a PDF transcript of the pod...

Words are the leader's primary tool for motivating people.  The right words inspire. The wrong words discourage. Wise leadership maintains highly motivated teams by choosing words which pack clout, even small three-letter words. In this episode, Dr. Mike Armour looks at five small words, terms which we use every day, and shows leaders how to harness them to great motivational advantage. Download a...

For trust to prevail in an organization, leaders must help every worker feel safe. In this episode, leadership coach Dr. Mike Armour (www. LeaderPerfect.com) examines how feeling unsafe leads to anxiety and fear and how these culprits usher in distrust. He also identifies a dozen signs of distrust. And he underscores the urgency of maintaining trust when managing change or reorganization. You can...

Leaders are generally aware that they have a duty to articulate and promote their organization's core values. But identifying these values is often a challenge. That's because so many values are important to the organization. Which ones are core? Complicating the issue, an organization's list of core values needs to be held to no more than seven values, preferably no more than five. Beyond that nu...

What would it mean to your organization if you could increase worker engagement 20 per cent? According to research done by Gallup, low worker engagement costs the global economy seven trillion dollars per year. While engagement is higher in North America than in many other parts of the world, only a third of American workers are truly engaged with their organization. This does not mean that other...

While all leadership strives for behavioral change, most leadership scenarios do not require a change in identity, as well. That’s what sets transformational leadership apart. Transformational leaders succeed only by changing the organization’s sense of identity – its sense of who it is and what it may become. And this change is not purely marginal or peripheral. It’s substantive. To accomplish wh...

At some point in corporate history, the words "manager" and "leader" came to be used synonymously, as though  leadership and management are one and the same. They are not. Leadership is uniquely people-centric in a way that management may or may not be. For example, we speak of managing people and leading people. We also speak of managing budgets and managing inventories. But we would never speak...

Leadership is one of the oldest roles in human society. Even the most primitive village needed leaders to assign duties and settle disputes.. From that starting point to the modern world, every advance in human society and technology has required leaders to master new leadership skills and techniques. For leadership, the challenge to learn and adapt to change is never-ending. Great leaders are lif...