No Bullsh!t Leadership

Episode #31 // The topical case study of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos provides an excellent backdrop for asking some pointed questions about leadership and culture. One of the great failings of Theranos was its culture of secrecy, and suppression of bad news from people who could clearly see the problems with the business.As leaders, we need to create a culture of robust (but respectful) challenge to bring out the best in our people, but this is impossible if we ‘shoot the messenger’, or unwittingly stymie the very behaviour we are trying to promote.Nothing kills a high performance culture faster than a leader who can’t handle dissent, disagreement, or bad news. In the case of Theranos, it led to the destruction of billions of dollars’ worth of value, and visited untold emotional and psychological damage on Theranos’ patients, customers, and employees.If you can manage to establish a climate where your people trust you enough to contribute fearlessly, without fear of repercussions, it is like rocket fuel for your team!If you want to dig deeper into the Theranos story, I highly recommend listening to The Dropout podcast.👉 Doors are open for Leadership Beyond the Theory. Be the boss you wish you had.🔗 Enroll now at leadershipbeyondthetheory.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode #30 // This week we cover a great question from our listener James about how to motivate people when the shine of consecutive pay rises and bonuses either wears off, or becomes unaffordable.This has led us to put together the definitive ‘how to’ guide for leaders on making remuneration decisions, and it is relevant for any size of organisation, from a ‘woman, a man and a dog in a garage’-style start up to a Fortune 500 company.Although remuneration policy is the domain of HR, accountability for understanding remuneration structures and making smart pay decisions sits squarely with leaders.This episode combines remuneration theory and leadership skill, providing a holistic guide that will help leaders to negotiate pay matters with clarity and confidence.Download the free comprehensive ‘Remuneration Guide for Leaders’ that we’ve put together for you at www.yourceomentor.com/episode30 and keep it on hand for any time you need to make a decision about how to pay your people!👉 Doors are open for Leadership Beyond the Theory. Be the boss you wish you had.🔗 Enroll now at leadershipbeyondthetheory.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode #29 // Everyone is driven by self-interest. It is an intrinsic part of the human DNA, so we can never overcome it entirely.However, we can learn to put self-interest aside for the greater good which, ironically, often results in better long term outcomes for us as individuals. This episode explores how we can fight our basic instincts with long term vision and belief.I have centred this episode on an incredible true story of how putting self-interest aside and focusing on the ‘greater good’ has resulted in one of the most incredible long term outcomes that any individual could hope for (but no spoilers yet as to what this is).The benefits of being able to put self-interest aside are many, and if you can manage to overcome this natural human instinct, the return over time is incalculable.I’ll give you my practical recipe for reframing any situation to enable a long term view that not only serves you best, but that other people will be drawn to!I'd love to hear your feedback on this episode, so send me an email to hello@yourceomentor.com and let me know what you thought!👉 Doors are open for Leadership Beyond the Theory. Be the boss you wish you had.🔗 Enroll now at leadershipbeyondthetheory.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode #28 // We have spoken in recent episodes about leadership attributes and competencies. During your career, you will come into contact with many people who are smart, well educated, experienced, shrewd, politically astute, and even some who are downright Machiavellian.So what is it that is going to make you stand out?In this episode, we cover off on the foundational criteria for career success (the ‘ticket to the dance’), and then go onto talk about what it takes to stand out even in this group.Knowing yourself, understanding your strengths and weaknesses, and not trying to be something you are not, are the keys to developing your own unique ‘leadership fingerprint’.If you like this episode, you may also wish to check out this great little blog article by Pamela Witter: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/discover-your-leadership-fingerprint-pamela-witter/.👉 Doors are open for Leadership Beyond the Theory. Be the boss you wish you had.🔗 Enroll now at leadershipbeyondthetheory.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode #27 // This week's episode is a de facto part 2 of episode 19 Execution for Results, so if you haven’t listened to that one yet I highly recommend doing it before you get stuck into this one!It focuses on how single point accountability is the most critical factor in being able to successfully execute on your plans, and sets the ground work for where we’re going today with Unleashing the Power of your People.This episode is all about empowerment, which is the flip side of the accountability coin. Accountability and empowerment should be inseparable, but often leaders don't understand that. Let's face it, execution is tough, but there are a few secrets that aren't often spoken about.So, I’m going to unpack those today!In this episode I start with a quick flyover the top of what accountability is as a refresher, and then I’ll cover the following:Why culture matters so much, and why a bad culture is inextricably linked to weak accountability leadersWhy crystal clear accountability is the key to successful executionWhat I believe the key elements are that need to be entrenched in the DNA of a high performance cultureI’ll then go through my ‘Nine Ways to Empower and Support Your People’ which you can download for free below - these are worth printing off and keeping handy so that you can refer to them as often as you needThis episode should create at least one ‘pie in the face’ moment for you, but I’m pretty confident that you’ll reflect on these and realise that there are quite few that could use your attention!You can use this episode to first evaluate your team and what you actually practice as a leader, and then rank which of these elements you should start implementing in order of where you believe the most value will come from.I would love to hear what you thought of this episode, and whether it enabled you to see your culture and team in a different light, so please send me your feedback at hello@yourceomentor.com.👉 Doors are open for Leadership Beyond the Theory. Be the boss you wish you had.🔗 Enroll now at leadershipbeyondthetheory.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode #26 // This week is Part Two of The Roadmap to Exceptional Leadership!I've taken my 30+ years of practical leadership experience, a LOT of trial and error and lessons from some incredible mentors, and have distilled these learnings into a model, my 'secret sauce'; the 7 Pillars of Leadership Performance, and this is what today’s episode is all about!These 7 pillars are designed to unlock the real, practical strategies and focus areas that we believe will make or break your leadership journey. These are the things that, in my experience, differentiate leaders from the incompetent, through the mediocre, to the great.In this episode I talk through the 7 Pillars of Leadership Performance in detail, covering why I believe they are so important, and what you can do to develop yourself in each of the below pillars:Deliver Value - This is the object of the exercise and this is where it all begins and ends for a leader, with a value creationHandle Conflict - Conflict aversion is one of the biggest career killers and it will basically dilute your effectiveness in pretty much everything you do as a leaderBuild Resilience - As we know, anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm. You don't find out what a leader is made of until they're put under pressure and many leaders foldWork at Level - It's so common to see leaders through all levels of an organisation working at the wrong level, sub-optimising their performance and effectively crippling their peopleMaster Ambiguity - One of the foremost jobs of a leader is to sit comfortably in ambiguity and to translate that into certainty of direction and action for their peopleDrive Accountability - If you want your people to execute well, nothing enables this more than clear, well-defined, single point accountabilities.Make Great Decisions - Leaders get paid the dizzy dollars to make hard calls and being a leader who can make timely, well-informed decisions, will put your team and organisation in a winning position.Together these 7 Pillars of Leadership Performance are what make up our online leadership program, Leadership Beyond the Theory, and hopefully you can see after this episode why that is!Enrolment for the program closes tomorrow, but we’ll be opening doors again in June for a mid-year cohort!Check out more details on the program at courses.yourceomentor.com👉 Doors are open for Leadership Beyond the Theory. Be the boss you wish you had.🔗 Enroll now at leadershipbeyondthetheory.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode #25 // This week’s episode is a big one! Once again I've developed a two part episode to deal with what I think is one of our larger topics, The Roadmap to Exceptional Leadership. Shoehorning this topic into a couple of brief podcast episodes is going to be tricky, but I am up for the challenge!This week in part one, we'll start by looking at common leadership attributes and competencies, the best place to start when we’re defining what an ‘exceptional leader’ actually is, without all the fluff! In this episode I’ll cover:The ideal leadership attributes that we so often hear are ‘important’, but are also strangely intangibleThe difference that personal perspective makes in creating meaning around leadership attributesAn example of how when I was CEO of CS Energy, I used key descriptors to explain certain attributes to my organisation, providing greater understanding of what behaviour I expectedWhy I think that leadership competencies are far more tangible (and relevant) than leadership attributesSome of the competencies of senior leadership that I learned from my time at Harvard Business School - you can download these competencies for free at www.yourceomentor.com/episode25 to self-evaluate, and evaluate those in your teamI’ll touch on The 7 Pillars of Leadership Performance which will give you an insight into next week’s episode where I’ll give away my ‘secret sauce' to becoming an exceptional leader!My hope is that this episode gets you thinking about what leadership attributes and competencies you currently have, and which ones you want to develop. Becoming an exceptional leader takes time, patience, discipline and an unwavering commitment to improving. It’s not easy, but the payback is incalculable.If this episode has given you a new perspective on leadership, and you feel as though you want to dive deeper into what it actually takes to become an exceptional leader, I strongly encourage you to check out our 7-week online leadership program, Leadership Beyond the Theory. Enrolment is only open for another 8 days before we close the door to this cohort.I’d love to know if this has helped you reframe your perspective on what great leadership is, so please send me an email (hello@yourceomentor.com) with your feedback!👉 Doors are open for Leadership Beyond the Theory. Be the boss you wish you had.🔗 Enroll now at leadershipbeyondthetheory.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode #24 // Did you listen to last week’s episode? If you haven’t, it’s well worth the 17 minutes to listen to it - it’s part 1 of Building Organisational Capability and it will give you a much better understanding of this episode!Today we’re onto Part 2: How do you build capability into your organisation and culture? We’re going to carry on from last week’s episode, by talking about how to build a competitive advantage into our culture - one of the toughest things to do.So I’ll start with a very short recap on last week's episode (remember our favourite acronym, PROFIT?), then I’ll cover the following:The career path dilemma between technical and leadership streaming inside an organisationSome ideas on how to create technical role streaming from my experienceHow to build technical capability in your organisation, with a big focus on how to take a methodical systematic approach to building leadership capabilitySome incredibly interesting stats from a McKinsey survey from a few years ago that looked at how companies build organisational capabilityAn important question that you need to ask yourself and spend time contemplating before you continue your career as a leaderMy four steps to building organisational capability (these are CRACKING, if I do say so myself!)A BIG mistake that many leaders make when trying to build organisational capabilityI’ll give you a sample performance standard (you’ll need to listen to the whole episode for context) as a free downloadable, which you can grab at www.yourceomentor.com/episode24The question on building organisational capability from our keen listener in Bucharest, Radu, has been quite challenging for me to answer, to be honest. I found it quite difficult to take such a vast and complex topic, and simplify it sufficiently to make it useful in a couple of short podcast episodes, so please feel free to let me know how you think I did.Send me an email (hello@yourceomentor.com), and pass this on to anyone you think who could benefit from delving into this topic!👉 Doors are open for Leadership Beyond the Theory. Be the boss you wish you had.🔗 Enroll now at leadershipbeyondthetheory.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode #23 // Today’s podcast deals with the vast area of building organisational capability, so I’ve split it into two episodes. This week, I’ll give you the context for what organisational capability is, how it fits with strategy, and where leaders most often put their focus. Next week, in part two, I’ll delve into what a leader should be doing, at any level, to build organisational capability through their people.Now before I get started, you may have seen on our social channels or received an email with the exciting news that our 7-week online leadership program Leadership Beyond the Theory, is now open for enrolment!Emma and I have been working on this for the past year, and are really proud of the final product. Leadership Beyond the Theory is a 7-week program, with class starting 4th March in a cohort format, that covers what I think are the seven core areas of leadership success - create value, handle conflict, master ambiguity and so forth culminating with the final module, on making great decisions. Like this podcast and the Leadership Level Up Masterclass, the content is designed to be simple and time effective, with readily implementable and practical steps. If you’re interested in checking it out, you can find more details here.Ok onto the episode! So in the first part of our discussion on organisational capability, we'll start by defining organisational capability (complete with a nifty little acronym that covers six key areas or categories that we like to focus upon). Then at the risk of oversimplifying all of this, I'm going to take a quick fly over the top of business strategy because there's years of study and learning in this area to be had. I’ll then go on to cover:An imperative question - where does competitive advantage come from?Some key findings on this subject from one of the world's foremost thought leaders in strategyWhere most leaders focus their energies (and what they should really be focusing their energies on)A few really great framing questions from Andrew McDonald to help you with your business strategyA note on competitive advantage and how long you can maintain it from the perspective of Harvard Business School’s David YoffieMy hypothesis as to why we aren’t necessarily good at building organisational capabilityAfter listening to this episode, you should be excited and waiting with bated breath for next week’s episode ‘Building Organisational Capability Part 2: Making it part of your culture’, where we look at building organisational capability through our people and leadership.Let me know by sending me an email to hello@yourceomentor.com if you had a lightbulb moment (or moments) while listening to this episode, I’d love to hear your feedback!Links to Other Useful Resources Referenced in the Episode​Just a reminder; I have no affiliation with any third-party resources recommended in this podcast. Any recommendations are for the benefit of the No Bullsh!t Leadership audience, as a way to better emphasise or expand on the concepts mentioned in the relevant episode. Here are a few that we mention in Episode 23. Podcast: HBR Ideacast // Episode 554 // Released 8th December 2016The “Jobs to be Done” Theory of InnovationContent by: Clay Christensen, Kim B Clark Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business SchoolBook: Good to Great by Jim CollinsAmazon Link 👉 Doors are open for Leadership Beyond the Theory. Be the boss you wish you had.🔗 Enroll now at leadershipbeyondthetheory.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast episode focuses on mastering the skill of giving feedback to your team. It covers the importance of difficult conversations in leadership, conflict aversion, and the seven key elements of a great feedback conversation. The hosts provide practical tips on preparation, scripting, and promoting dialogue with individuals. They also highlight the importance of focusing on the individual and self-evaluation to continuously improve feedback skills.