Episode #274 // Since releasing our new self-paced short course, Landing Your Dream Job , we’ve had a stream of questions from our leadership community about whether or not the course is applicable to them. In this week's episode, Em joins me as we answer two of the most commonly asked questions, which deal with key aspects of the job search process: “ How do I network and utilize my mentors most effectively? ” and; “ How can I determine which role is best for me? ” Your long-term career future ...
Nov 28, 2023•19 min•Season 1Ep. 274
Moment #44 // If you’re in it for yourself, your people will never be in it for you. Ever. Self-seeking leaders can’t bring out the best in their people, because it’s almost impossible to rally them to a higher purpose. One of the keys to unlocking your people’s discretionary effort, and stretching them to perform at the next level, is that you have to subordinate short-term considerations for the greater good. You can take a deeper dive into these insights by listening to Ep.29: Win...
Nov 26, 2023•5 min
Episode #273 // In order to convey the No Bullsh!t Leadership principles concisely, I explain them in quite categorical terms—it has to be that way so that you can understand the principles sufficiently well to implement them. But, as with everything in life, nothing is just black or white… there are exceptions, there are judgment calls, and there are 1,000 annoying shades of gray! A CEO who I’m quite close to recently challenged my mantra of friendly, not friends , and I realized that, while I ...
Nov 21, 2023•21 min•Season 1Ep. 273
Moment #43 // We generally talk about stress like it's a bad thing. Putting people under stress is something that many leaders try to avoid. Why? Because, if you put people under stress, then maybe they won't like you anymore. Instead, we choose to lean into our well-developed power of rationalization, and do everything we can to give ourselves a reason to not ask our people to stretch. But, unfortunately, stress is a prerequisite for high performance… You can take a deeper div...
Nov 19, 2023•5 min
Episode #272 // According to LinkedIn , 70% of the global workforce isn't actively job searching, but 87% are open to new opportunities. This reflects a universal truth in the professional world – many are passively open to new job opportunities, yet they rarely actively pursue them. It's a common trap that we see even the most ambitious leaders fall into: passively waiting, relying on people in their existing networks to approach them, or counting on that internal promotion that's 'just around ...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 272
Moment #42 // Have you ever questioned your boss about a particular task, and at the end of a brief exchange, he simply says: “Look, just do it, OK?” Although I’m sure no one sets out to become a Nike boss, sometimes it’s simply the product of a leader being overworked… or not having sufficient information about why something needs to be done… or because explaining would be difficult and time-consuming… or because it may potentially put them in a situation of escalating conflict. Nike boss...
Nov 12, 2023•5 min
Episode #271 // In today’s evolving world of business, there’s an ever-increasing focus on employee wellness. Mental health, which was a taboo subject until fairly recently, now has to be front-of-mind for every leader. A leader’s duty of care for their people used to be confined to the workplace. Now, there’s an increasingly broad interpretation of a leader’s obligations to look after their people, which is much more holistic, and reaches well beyond the boundaries of the workplace. And still, ...
Nov 07, 2023•28 min•Season 1Ep. 271
Moment #41 // It can be a little daunting to take on a new role, especially when it's at a higher level than the roles you've previously held. Whether you’ve been promoted internally, or appointed from outside the company, you need to set strong expectations right from the get go. It's really important to stamp your mark on a new role early. People need to know what to expect from you… and the more clarity you can give them, the better. You can take a deeper dive into these insights ...
Nov 05, 2023•5 min
Episode #270 // Innovation is key to sustained performance. Whether we look at it from a company perspective, or at the level of countries and global economies, innovation fuels productivity and growth. We’ve seen this over and over throughout the centuries, where a technological or scientific breakthrough has driven new levels of prosperity that were previously unimagined. We now live in the most affluent times in human history. Our life expectancy and our standard of living is mass...
Oct 31, 2023•18 min•Season 1Ep. 270
Moment #40 // Simplicity goes hand-in-hand with focus. We all try to do too much, for all the right reasons, and with the best intent. But, more often than not, this is incredibly counter-productive. As a leader, value, performance, and forward momentum all rely on having a crystal clear focus on the right things. But this is hard to achieve, because perfectionism hides in complexity. Even though The Pursuit of Perfection sounds noble, more often than not it’s simply masking the fear of ge...
Oct 29, 2023•5 min
Episode #269 // One of the positive (and virtually inevitable) outcomes of improving your leadership confidence and capability is that your opportunities for promotion start to come thick and fast. And there’s a reason for this: as your leadership skill improves, so do the results that your teams achieve. But when you've already achieved best-in-class performance, you’re expected to know what you're doing in any given situation. The people who promote you assume that you'll continue to be largel...
Oct 24, 2023•19 min•Season 1Ep. 269
Moment #39 // Formal education is important to establish a baseline for your career. It’s like buying a ticket to the dance. But management and leadership education comes later in your career, and it’s often valued very differently, depending on where you live. In Australia, an MBA is entirely optional… in the US, it’s essential if you’re serious about progressing to the heights of corporate America. No matter where you live, though, education in all its forms is there to support you...
Oct 22, 2023•5 min
Episode #268 // We know that every individual is unique, and despite all the conventional wisdom about how to motivate people, everyone is completely different in regard to what drives them. In my experience, you never really know what’s going to switch the lights on for someone. You just have to keep trying, over and over, to reach every single person. This means you have to use different (sometimes novel) techniques, and varying levels of pressure. When you see a breakthrough, it...
Oct 17, 2023•19 min•Season 1Ep. 268
Moment #38 // Is the virtually limitless supply of cheap, instantaneously-accessible information making it easier for us to make decisions? And are those decisions any better than the ones we made 20 years ago? Malcolm Gladwell says, “ We clutter our decision-making process with extraneous information in the hope that it makes us better off in the end. It's a fool's game .” This moment reminds us to focus on what's most important . Too much information just makes it harder for us to process the ...
Oct 15, 2023•7 min
Episode #267 // Every so often, we produce an episode of No Bullsh!t Leadership that challenges conventional leadership wisdom. I call them my ' myth buster' episodes, and in the past, I’ve taken on some of the most widely accepted axioms: Are happy workers really productive workers? Why is leading from the front a bad idea? Why do consensus-based decisions deliver inferior outcomes? Why is imposter syndrome good for you? Challenging conventional wisdom is tricky, because there’s always at...
Oct 10, 2023•17 min•Season 1Ep. 267
Moment #37 // There's no doubt that systemic bias exists in hiring - but sometimes, even with the best intentions, it's really difficult to improve diversity. Quite often, you’re simply dealing with a shallow pool of talent. Entrenched beliefs and attitudes at lower levels of an organization act as a barrier to progress - not just for women, but for any minority group that's not the typical appointee. The homogenous, safe candidate is effectively ‘green lit’ all the way through the p...
Oct 08, 2023•4 min
Episode #266 // Some of the most impactful transformation work that I saw in large industrial firms came as a result of McKinsey’s involvement: everything from procurement to capital productivity, and operational performance. Last year, three McKinsey partners published a book titled, CEO Excellence: The six mindsets that distinguish the best leaders from the rest . After examining more than 20 years’ worth of data on 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 public companies, they conducted detailed intervi...
Oct 03, 2023•21 min•Season 1Ep. 266
Moment #36 // Well-run businesses can be boring. They don't experience frequent crises and they don't encounter surprises at every turn. Why? Because the leaders understand risk, and they plan accordingly, avoiding the majority of disasters that other companies routinely face. Poorly-run companies thrive on crisis management and firefighting. Once this becomes the predominant culture, people become comfortable living in a break/fix cycle. There's never any real focus on eliminating the roo...
Oct 01, 2023•4 min
Episode #265 // Em and I work our butts off every day to produce high-quality, practical leadership content that you can apply immediately, to improve your team’s capability and performance. And, even though we talk about the emotional, psychological, and mental barriers that have to be overcome to achieve leadership excellence, what I don’t often talk about is the personal investment in the relationship capital that makes all this possible. You may have heard me talk about the nee...
Sep 26, 2023•21 min•Season 1Ep. 265
Moment #35 // There are many ways to end up in the C-suite. You can just choose to work hard, and wait for your promotions. But, in larger organizations, this can take many years. And, at each new layer, you're in competition for the next spot above you with a bunch of other smart, ambitious people from both inside and outside your organization. Even though I’d never hold up my own career path as something you should try to emulate, there are some interesting learnings to take from it. Int...
Sep 24, 2023•4 min
Episode #264 // I read an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, titled The Art of Balancing Autonomy and Control , which outlines how to get the best results from the innovation activities your company undertakes. The moral of the story is, nose in, fingers out! This led me to think more broadly about the concept of autonomy v control, in particular how it relates to optimizing both performance and employee satisfaction. If you give your people too much autonomy , you risk wasting a lot of...
Sep 19, 2023•17 min•Season 1Ep. 264
Moment #34 // They say that the best disinfectant is sunlight, and I'm a huge believer in that principle. If my direct reports in CS Energy heard it once they heard it a thousand times: transparency is everything. But just how much transparency should you give to your people? Issues of trust, accountability, confidentiality, and context all play a part in how much transparency it’s reasonable to offer. Like many areas of leadership, it can be a complex balance! I wrote an article on this s...
Sep 17, 2023•4 min
Episode #263 // After speaking to a group of Executive MBA students last week, I had pause to reflect on my career journey, my educational choices, and what I considered to be the determinants of my modest success to date. If I really distilled the key things that have helped me to grow rapidly over the years, what would they be? I’ve often said that leaders are learners, but you could spend a lot of time these days consuming information, without getting traction: and by traction, I mean gaining...
Sep 12, 2023•21 min•Season 1Ep. 263
Moment #33 // Why is it so difficult to get over the need to be liked? Because it’s completely ingrained… it's programmed into all of us. It's part of our DNA and it's controlled by our reptilian brain. It's an instinctive response. But, counterintuitively, to be a competent leader you have to overcome that fundamental evolutionary urge. Putting Respect Before Popularity requires a huge amount of empathy, which is why it’s so important to have a highly-developed EQ. Isn't it ironic t...
Sep 10, 2023•4 min
Episode #262 // Really good people get stuck in their careers, for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, it’s obvious why it’s happening to them, and other times it’s a little more perplexing. We get questions from our leadership community all the time relating to career progression, and they come from all levels—even C-suite executives who want to break into their first CEO role: What do hiring managers look for? What foundational behaviors and capabilities do you need? How do you becom...
Sep 05, 2023•18 min•Season 1Ep. 262
Moment #32 // I went through some incredibly disruptive events during my corporate career - and it's fair to say that some of them pushed me to the edge of my personal capacity. Despite the personal toll, when I look back I’m so grateful that I was able to experience those situations. I never felt that there was anything I couldn't ultimately handle, and the accelerated learning that I took from each situation really turbocharged my career. I couldn't have achieved anywhere nea...
Sep 03, 2023•3 min
Episode #261 // The central element of the No Bullsh!t Leadership Framework is value . It should be the primary focus of every leader, at every level, in every organization. Value first… that’s it! Although we automatically think of financial value, value can be created in many different forms. Your imperative, as a leader, is to understand which of the things your people do genuinely create value, and which things simply generate activity for its own sake. If you can manage to align the ...
Aug 29, 2023•20 min•Season 1Ep. 261
Moment #31 // How comfortable are you when making “ high-impact ” decisions? You know, the ones that really test you… the ones that scare you... the ones that you know can potentially have serious consequences if you get them wrong. You don't have to be the CEO of a Fortune 100 company to make high-impact decisions. The founder of any small business has to make decisions every day, many of which can potentially make or break their business. No matter how big or small the decision, using yo...
Aug 27, 2023•4 min
*SPECIAL EPISODE* #260 // Are you fed up with average team performance and missed targets? Or maybe you feel like your passion for leadership has been on the decline? Get ready to breathe new life into your team with Day 1 of the Motivate to Elevate bootcamp - Setting the Bar: Raising the standard of leadership excellence. Soon you'll all be saying goodbye to mediocrity and embracing a future of exceptional results! ———————— LEADERSHIP BEYOND THE THEORY DOORS ARE NOW OPEN FOR THE SEPTEMBER 2023 ...
Aug 22, 2023•29 min•Season 1Ep. 260
Moment #30 // Why are such vast numbers of senior leaders so prone to believing their own bullsh!t? There are a bunch of underlying (but observable) factors, which we’re all subject to, that push us to believe our own bullsh!t. It takes discipline, self-awareness, and insight to overcome them, and to rise above the facade. This moment looks at four of the key psychological drivers, and how they operate on our subconscious mind. You can take a deeper dive into these insights by listening to Ep.14...
Aug 20, 2023•4 min
