Moment #20 // In a hot job market, you can't retain every one of your people, which is why it’s important to think about who your star performers are, and to make sure they don’t go anywhere. This necessitates a very deliberate approach to talent management and retention. Looking at individual performance first, identifying any critical roles, and understanding which core functions truly enable your business to compete, will enable you to target the people you really need to retain. You can take...
Jun 11, 2023•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #249 // Did you know that while 83% of organizations acknowledge the importance of developing leaders, only 5% actually follow through? It's no wonder many leaders feel lost and unfulfilled. If you've been yearning for a more fulfilling leadership career, this episode is for you. Imagine taking control of your own development, transcending the boundaries set by others. The truth is, nobody will care about your career growth as passionately as you do. If you're unsure where to begin, we'v...
Jun 06, 2023•31 min•Ep 249•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #19 // To make any serious change requires a change of culture—the way we do things around here—and changing culture is not for the faint of heart. It takes discipline, perseverance, time, energy, some pain, a bunch of momentum, some tough decisions, courage, influence, collaboration - it’s not at all easy to change a culture. If you want to be a leader who drives change, who creates a high performance culture, then you’d better pay attention to your people, and you’d better burn th...
Jun 04, 2023•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #248 // We still seem to be witnessing some pretty spectacular failures in corporate governance. Every week, the financial press manages to uncover some sort of personal scandal, a sudden and unexpected decline in performance, or a breach of a company’s social license to operate. Even more common now, is the reporting on companies’ handling of workforce issues, like layoffs, and return to the office policies. I came across an interesting interview with one of Australia’s leading company ...
May 30, 2023•16 min•Ep 248•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #18 // How do you know when the right time is to let a poor performer go? Many leaders sit back and just hope that the person will improve. But hope isn’t a strategy. And when you’re dealing with a historically poor performer, it's rarely the case that they lift to meet the minimum acceptable standard. The most commonly cited regret of great leaders, as they reflect on their careers, is that they didn't move quickly enough to remove the people who they knew couldn’t do the job . If ...
May 28, 2023•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #247 // Virtually every organization has some form of operational delivery capability for its products and services. More often than not, your ability to compete in the market can be strengthened through operational excellence. But operational excellence is elusive, and many of the programs that companies invest in to deliver improved operational performance only ever realize a fraction of the potential benefits. Senior leaders often focus purely on the technical and process elemen...
May 23, 2023•21 min•Ep 247•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #17 // Low accountability cultures are riddled with barriers to performance. The leaders resign themselves to the fact that gaps and overlaps are inevitable, and they rationalize that strong single point accountabilities aren’t really necessary. What are the 5 hidden drivers of low accountability ? And how do you find them before they damage your team’s performance? Everyone deserves to be treated equally, but they also have to be held to account for the way they behave and perform… other...
May 21, 2023•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #246 // One of the most widespread and seemingly intractable problems facing leaders and organizations everywhere, is the drive to focus only on short-term results. And this condition doesn’t discriminate between industries, countries, or cultures. Almost everything that happens in our work lives locks us inside the prison walls of an ever-present, high-demand, short-term focus. Very few leaders develop the type of long-term perspective that enables genuine attention to where a co...
May 16, 2023•19 min•Ep 246•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #16 // Some companies have turned the concept of believing your own bullshit into an art form! It’s really easy to convince ourselves that we are achieving amazing things when, in actual fact, very little is changing. Do you believe your own bullsh!t? For more depth on this insight, listen to Ep.143 of the No Bullsh!t Leadership Podcast : Believing Your Own Bullsh!t . ———————— FREE 5 DAY LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE: Want to boost your leadership capability? This challenge will start you down the...
May 14, 2023•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #245 // I’m a vocal advocate of strong leadership: the need to stretch people to achieve extraordinary performance, with a single-minded focus on value creation (bearing in mind, of course, that value comes in many different forms: it’s not just financial results). Recently, we’ve seen two cases from opposite sides of the world in which the stated drive for improved performance has resulted in serious allegations of bullying. The first, is Dominic Raab, the UK’s Deputy PM, who was forced...
May 09, 2023•20 min•Ep 245•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #15 // The primary function of a leader is to create and maintain a culture that’s conducive to performance excellence… a culture where every individual is committed to giving their best every day. More often than not, cultures just grow organically, as people learn over time what the expectations and limits of the leader truly are. If you don’t focus, deliberately and explicitly, on creating the type of culture that drives genuine performance, then the culture you get will be… what...
May 07, 2023•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #244 // One of the toughest elements of leadership is managing your people’s performance. Everyone has to meet a minimum acceptable standard, of course… but beyond that, you also want to be able to lead your best people to perform at their peak. We get an endless stream of questions about the performance management ecosystem, particularly when a team member slips into chronic underperformance. There’s no doubt that every situation is different, but there are some common themes running th...
May 02, 2023•22 min•Ep 244•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #14 // On one level, politics can be seen simply as a process of influencing. But more often, it’s a devious, divisive tool used by unscrupulous individuals to further their own standing—it creates a toxic and cancerous culture. How do you spot a political animal? Office politics can be incredibly destructive, but there's no organization that's completely immune to it. No great leader plays politics, but they’re acutely aware of it: and the first step is to be able to recognize a po...
Apr 30, 2023•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #243 // Whatever you try to achieve as a leader relies, at least to some extent, on your credibility. If you have strong personal credibility, it makes everything you do inordinately easier. Credibility galvanizes your team… it instills confidence in the people above you… and it ultimately becomes an integral part of your leadership brand. Without it, every yard you manage to move forward feels hard. There’s no shortage of smart executives in the world, but there are v...
Apr 25, 2023•20 min•Ep 243•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #13 // Do you have decision fatigue? During the course of every day, our brains are forced to make thousands of decisions, big and small. The cumulative effect of all these decisions is mental fatigue, which can result in poor judgment and irrational decision making, even when faced with relatively simple decisions. But using the decision fatigue label provides an excuse for not dealing with something that we should actually deal with. Making decisions is part of life, it's part of ...
Apr 23, 2023•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #242 // The question we used to ask only occasionally has now become more frequent… “ how old is too old? ” While most countries still regard the retirement age for the average citizen to be somewhere in their early to mid-60s, one of the big societal trends in wealthier countries is the aging population. As the population ages, many people will choose to work for longer, either to satisfy their need for purpose, or through financial necessity. The bottom line for leaders is that you’re ...
Apr 18, 2023•19 min•Ep 242•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #12 // Blaming others when something doesn’t go to plan is one of the most insidious leadership behaviors. It’s a cancer in your culture that has to be eradicated. When a leader tolerates the blame game, excuses become the norm, and organizational politics thrives. You have to learn how to deliver bad news, even when your boss doesn’t want to hear about it. Equally, you have to encourage your people by rewarding those who choose to take the path of strength and proactiveness, creati...
Apr 16, 2023•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ep #241 // It’s always been a tough ask to get your boss to provide additional resources, whether it’s money, people, or assets. And it’s certainly not getting any easier in the current environment. Businesses in virtually every sector of the economy are being squeezed with rising costs, high interest rates, and a bear labor market. The mantra of doing more with less has never been more pronounced than it is right now: it’s simply the default position, whether by design, or by sheer necess...
Apr 11, 2023•18 min•Ep 241•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #11 // One of the most important roles that a leader plays is to set the right standards for performance and behavior. Sometimes, we think we're setting an appropriately high performance standard, but the exceptions we make indicate otherwise. How do you actually set the standard? And if it’s higher than people are used to, how do you communicate what you need from them? Never walk past an inferior standard of performance or behavior—it either builds or breaks your culture! You can take a...
Apr 09, 2023•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #240 // We’ve all come across people during our careers who are really good at what they do, but are just awful to work with. They seem to think that their superior performance gives them the license to behave in any manner they see fit, and they don’t observe the usual social protocols that are essential in maintaining a stable team. Talented jerks come in many different shapes and sizes: there’s no one-size-fits-all description of how they show up in a team. Some are just terminally an...
Apr 04, 2023•19 min•Ep 240•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #8 // If you need to be liked, and you have aspirations of being a leader, you’re going to find yourself in trouble pretty quickly. Virtually everything you do as a leader puts you into a potential conflict situation. Seeking popularity will stunt your leadership growth, dull your decision-making, and feed your tendency to procrastinate. Popularity doesn’t matter… respect does, which is why you need to be comfortable with the concept of doing hard things that may make you unpopular. You c...
Apr 02, 2023•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #239 // The proverbial high performing team has become a leadership cliché, and I can’t count the number of leaders who claim to have built a high performing team (often, despite objective evidence to the contrary). But what if the culture you’re leading in is actually a low performance culture? We get lots of questions from leaders about the difficulties they have applying basic performance management principles and, more often than not, the root cause is a pervasive, low performance cu...
Mar 28, 2023•21 min•Ep 239•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #9 // Many leaders claim to have built high-performing teams but, in my experience, most can’t even clearly articulate what a high-performing team is! And if you really want to build a high performing team—then there’s going to be some pretty tough leadership work ahead. Many leaders fall at the first hurdle: high-performing teams are comprised of high-performing individuals : no passengers, no tourists! You can take a deeper dive into these insights by listening to Ep.2: Building a High-...
Mar 26, 2023•5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #238 // Leadership drives culture, culture drives performance. Today, we look at a few very common team culture dynamics, and give some perspectives for how you might be able to handle these situations, when you find yourself in the middle of them. The first is the incredibly common phenomenon of the supposed star performer who ‘manages up’ brilliantly, but doesn’t actually deliver… and the boss is too weak, or too conflict-averse to hold them to account—they’d rather let the rest of the...
Mar 21, 2023•16 min•Ep 238•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #8 // Permissive Leaders Make People Unproductive AND Unhappy I've seen the devastating effects of laissez-faire leaders. They seem to think that if you keep people happy , they’ll naturally give you their best work. In my experience, this is almost never the case. Worse still, these leaders often mistake a constructive culture, to mean you can only say positive things to people. Make no mistake, there's nothing soft about a constructive culture. It only exists when a leader d...
Mar 19, 2023•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #237 // If you feel as though you’re struggling to hire the right people at the moment, this episode will rebuild your faith in the process, despite the current labor market dynamics. Unfortunately, a few poorly-timed or unexpected resignations can leave critical gaps in your capability. And this feels even worse when you place an ad on an online job board expecting an influx of high-quality candidates, only to hear the sound of tumbleweeds sweeping across the tundra. This can affect you...
Mar 14, 2023•19 min•Ep 237•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #7 // Building a Diverse Organization Isn’t Simple If it was easy to build a diverse organization, everyone would have already done it. There's a couple of limiting factors that I've learned from experience make this incredibly difficult. Historical disadvantage, subconscious bias, and a lack of forward thinking all contribute to this vexed problem. So where do you start? You can take a deeper dive into these insights by listening to Ep.11: Pale, Male, and Stale ———————— FREE 5 DAY LEADER...
Mar 12, 2023•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #236 // Have you ever wondered why people who are clearly at the top of their game all of a sudden have a steep decline in performance? Things that they’ve been able to routinely do at an elite level all of a sudden seem to be beyond their reach. I saw an example of this just recently, where a professional NFL footballer inexplicably lost the plot. His physical abilities were no different after the slump in form as they were prior to the slump. But it looked like his mental state was nig...
Mar 07, 2023•19 min•Ep 236•Transcript available on Metacast Moment #6 // Great leaders set an appropriate decision-making culture. People need to know that robust challenge is expected and rewarded , not frowned upon and suppressed. You have to be able to challenge each other , if you want to bring out your best. This invariably involves some friction… but it’s the only way to bring the often opposing views to the table, debate them, and work through them together. You can take a deeper dive into these insights by listening to Ep.20: Make Great Dec...
Mar 05, 2023•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode #235 // Momentum is really picking up for Your CEO Mentor in 2023, so in this episode I thought I’d share our plans for the evolution of No Bullsh!t Leadership . Of course, the fundamentals will remain the same. Our purpose keeps us focused on delivering practical, high-quality content every week to cut through the spin, the noise, and the political correctness that dominate today’s world of leadership development. We’re here for one reason, and one reason only: to improve the quality of...
Feb 28, 2023•16 min•Ep 235•Transcript available on Metacast 
