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3 Reasons “Good” People Aren’t RIGHT for Your Organization

3 Reasons “Good” People Aren’t RIGHT for Your Organization

The most important question in business is and will forever be “WHO?” Here’s why: The best idea, strategy, and plan on the planet doesn’t yield a thing without the right people in place to execute and make it happen. Although this sounds straightforward and logical, the process of identifying the right “seats” (roles) and then […]

5 Big Moves to Raise Expectations & Performance

5 Big Moves to Raise Expectations & Performance

“High expectations are the key to everything.” – Sam Walton Although you’ve probably heard the phrase, “you get what you expect,” have you truly integrated high- and continually bar-raising expectations into your leadership style? Here’s why this is such a critical attribute for growth-minded leaders: Expectations of ourselves and others exert a profound impact on […]

Get Your Fish Out of the Tree: 3 Ways to Get Capable People in the Right Roles to Grow Your Firm

Get Your Fish Out of the Tree: 3 Ways to Get Capable People in the Right Roles to Grow Your Firm

“It’s more important to do big things well than to do the small things perfectly.” –Ray Dalio As leaders, we pride ourselves on being resourceful, agile, and generally fast-moving. Much of the time, this is an admirable trait that yields decent results. On the other hand, there are moments when the fast or easy or […]

4 Sources of Organizational Callus and How to Avoid Them

4 Sources of Organizational Callus and How to Avoid Them

I recently taught a masterclass on Building a Culture of Accountability for The Growth Faculty, Australia’s leading live leadership events production company. During the Q&A session, a participant asked how to make matrixed organizations more accountable. My answer was short and to the point: “You don’t,” which is why I’m not a fan of matrixed structures. But […]

3 Ways to Avoid Attention Hijackers

3 Ways to Avoid Attention Hijackers

Enjoying these newsletters? Join my Substack Community for more exclusivecontent and insights, plus FREE access to livevirtual Coaching Gymnasiums and other events. Have you ever experienced this? A friend mentions their intention to buy a certain type of car and then – suddenly – you see that specific car everywhere. This isn’t magic, but a matter […]

4 Surprising & Productive Questions for Leaders

4 Surprising & Productive Questions for Leaders

“The best scientists and explorers have the attributes of kids! They ask questions and have a sense of wonder. They have curiosity. ‘Who, what, where, why, when, and how!’ They never stop asking questions, and I never stop asking questions, just like a five year old.” – Sylvia Earle, Marine Biologist, Explorer, Author, and Lecturer […]

4 Hard Leadership Lessons from the Trenches of 2021

4 Hard Leadership Lessons from the Trenches of 2021

There is great value in pausing to reflect, lest yesterday’s hard-earned lessons become lost in the noise of today’s challenge. In my client meeting rhythms, the opening pulse check ritual is a series of questions answered individually by each executive in the room, with a three-minute time limit to ensure brevity and reflection on the […]

3 Ways Leadership and Management Are Totally Different

3 Ways Leadership and Management Are Totally Different

Leading and managing are distinct roles, each critical to your organization’s health, that require different skills and capabilities. Yet all too often, I see well-intentioned entrepreneurs, CEOs, and their executive teams blend them and unknowingly slow their progress. I recently spoke with a CEO (I’ll call Sarah) who was disappointed and frustrated with her HR […]

How to Conquer Your Irrational Self

How to Conquer Your Irrational Self

Do you consider yourself a rational thinker? Chances are, assuming you are reasonably sane, your answer is “yes.” You may even find it a bit odd that I asked! And you’re not alone: We humans believe ourselves to be rational creatures. But the assumption that you in particular—and humans in general—are inherently rational is incorrect. […]

3 Things to Radically Rethink in Your Business

3 Things to Radically Rethink in Your Business

When was the last time you radically rethought and changed something within your business? To be clear, I’m not referring to incremental improvement, the addition of a new capability, or any other change that wouldn’t fit the definition of “radical.” As painful or potentially challenging as this may seem, every organization must periodically apply radical rethinking to itself […]

Use These 4 Disciplines to Communicate with Impact

Use These 4 Disciplines to Communicate with Impact

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it took place.” – George Bernard Shaw Think about the last time a miscommunication negatively impacted you, your team, and/or your firm. Odds are, it happened within the past few business days, if not the past 24 hours. Whether in terms of time, money, reputation, […]

Leadership Is Hard––Use These Four Strategies to Overcome Adversity

Leadership Is Hard — Use These Four Strategies to Overcome Adversity

Think about the most significant achievement in your life and how you made it happen. Was it easy, or was it hard? Chances are, it was hard (or even extremely hard!), which is likely what made the achievement significant to you. Hard things tend to be worthwhile. Really hard things can be epic! Yet, I’ve heard plenty […]

5 Steps to Achieve Lasting Change More Quickly with Less Effort

5 Steps to Achieve Lasting Change More Quickly with Less Effort

Although the words “change” and “leadership” go hand-in-hand, and every performance improvement is itself a change, very few leaders know much about the process of change. The stakes here are high, as failed change and/or improvement initiatives are frustrating, costly, and energy-depleting for everyone involved! In search of a sustainable solution, I recently took a deep dive […]

5 Crippling Consequences of Exponential Growth and How to Avoid Them

5 Crippling Consequences of Exponential Growth and How to Avoid Them

“Growth is painful. Change is painful. But, nothing is as painful as staying stuck where you do not belong.” — N. R. Narayana Murthy ================================================================ “The yucca plant was dying,” my client Liz said. “Pressure from the root ball caused the pot to burst because it literally didn’t have any more room to grow. Now […]

Five Leadership Behaviors that Create Independent and Empowered Employees

Five Leadership Behaviors that Create Independent and Empowered Employees

Can you imagine how great it would be if your employees were more independent, more proactive, better decision makers, and did the “right things” more often without needing much guidance? These easy-to-list, challenging-to-achieve attributes eliminate countless leadership headaches and benefit any organization in multiple ways. They’re also required if your aspirations include elevating your leadership […]

8 Spring Cleaning Hacks to Refresh, Refocus, and Reenergize Your Leadership

You’re excited. You’re about to leave on your first real away-from-home vacation since 2019, before the pandemic. Tickets in hand and visions of a white sandy beach, aquamarine water, and exotic cocktails dancing in your head, you board the airplane and take your seat. Moments later, the captain’s voice confidently comes over the intercom. “Welcome […]

4 Leadership Strategies to Eliminate Excuse-Making

4 Leadership Strategies to Eliminate Excuse-Making

Accountability for results is a perennial challenge for business leaders worldwide. It’s costly and frustrating––not only for shareholders and leaders, but also for top-performing employees who see underperformance in others tolerated and often rewarded. Excuse-making is a common symptom of low accountability. But beware: the excuses I’m referring to aren’t always obvious like the adult […]

Stop Waiting for the Next Win: 3 Strategies to Advance Your Firm Right Now

Stop Waiting for the Next Win: 3 Strategies to Advance Your Firm Right Now

“We need to get our sales floor some kind of win,” the Chief Revenue Officer said hopefully. It was our last sales leadership team meeting of 2020, and she was focused on their pandemic-afflicted lead flow, still down approximately 25 percent from a year earlier. Fewer leads meant fewer conversations with prospective clients. Fewer conversations […]

Six Principles of Influence for Leaders

Six Principles of Influence for Leaders

Influential people make things happen. What’s more, they rarely struggle to get others to follow their lead or listen to their point of view. How effectively do you wield influence to enhance your impact as a leader? Influential leaders change the behavior of others, nudging them to do or think what they want them to, […]

Five Leadership Patterns that Accelerate Sustainable Growth

Five Leadership Patterns that Accelerate Sustainable Growth

For the past twelve years (and counting), every quarterly leadership team meeting begins with a bright spot identification exercise. Every. Single. One. I use this ritual with my coaching clients—leadership teams running high-growth small- and mid-market firms—for a number of reasons: It opens a full, intense day of strategic planning on a positive note, it […]

Six Research-Based Strategies To Improve Self-Awareness and Leadership

Six Research-Based Strategies To Improve Self-Awareness and Leadership

The first article in this 2-part series featuring Tasha Eurich explored the fundamentals of self-awareness, why it matters so much for leaders, and the two habits of highly self-aware people. Tasha is an organizational psychologist, executive coach, researcher, and the New York Times best-selling author of Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See us, […]

The Surprising Power of Self-Awareness for Leaders

The Surprising Power of Self-Awareness for Leaders

“On a good day, 80 percent of us are lying to ourselves about whether we’re lying to ourselves.” — Tasha Eurich I recently had a fascinating conversation with organizational psychologist, executive coach, researcher, and New York Times best-selling author Tasha Eurich. Her most recent book, Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See us, How […]

The Compounding Effect: 4 Leadership Behaviors That Lead to Remarkable Results

“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it… He who doesn’t, pays it.” –Albert Einstein It’s been said that there is no such thing as an overnight success. The same is true of failure. Your outcomes are simply the accumulation of your choices and behaviors, compounded over time. […]

No Mud, No Magic: How Serial Tech Entrepreneur Luke Cooper Found Success by Getting His Hands Dirty

No Mud, No Magic: How Serial Tech Entrepreneur Luke Cooper Found Success by Getting His Hands Dirty

I recently connected with serial tech entrepreneur Luke Cooper, who sold his mobile tech support startup Fixt to Fortune 500 firm Assurant in 2020 for an impressive eleven times revenue. Luke and I chatted about his leadership journey, how he stacked the deck to sell his business for a large multiple, some of his key […]

How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Hyper-Focus

How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Hyper-Focus

A number of years ago, I was coaching Alex (not his real name), a successful CEO in the technology sector. Alex was extremely focused on bringing in sales. He constantly feared that there wouldn’t be enough and channeled the vast majority of his energy and time into avoiding that outcome. During plentiful times—when there was […]

How to Build an Infinite Mindset: 5 Practices of Infinite-Minded Leadership

How to Build an Infinite Mindset: 5 Practices of Infinite-Minded Leadership

The first article in this series featuring Stephen Shedletzky focused on the difference between finite and infinite thinking, why that matters, and the power of an infinite mindset. Stephen is the Head of Brand Experience and Lead Igniter at Simon Sinek’s organization. The aspirations of infinite-minded organizations are “to advance a purpose, to protect people, […]

The Power of an Infinite Mindset: Are You Playing the Right Game?

The Power of an Infinite Mindset: Are You Playing the Right Game?

I recently sat down with Stephen Shedletzky who leads Brand Experience and the team of Igniters for Simon Sinek’s organization. We discussed their work, Simon’s latest book, The Infinite Game, and more. So much more, in fact, that I’ll be covering the content from our conversation in two parts. In this article, we’ll focus on […]

4 Costly Decision-Making Missteps and How to Avoid Them

4 Costly Decision-Making Missteps and How to Avoid Them

As a leader, you likely spend much of your time thinking about results—financial, operational, and otherwise. But how often do you rigorously reflect on the quality of your decision-making and how to improve it over time? This is an important question because – whether you realize it or not – wherever you happen to be […]

Hidden Power of Emotions

How to Capitalize on the Hidden Power of Emotions: 3 Levers to Enhance Your Leadership

If you knew me anytime between high school and my early 40s, you would have described me as a person who was perpetually happy and optimistic. If you asked me how I was doing, I would tell you everything was “great”—even when it wasn’t. In reality, I believed sharing my emotions, especially negative ones, would […]

Is Your Leadership on Track?

Is Your Leadership on Track? Periodically Evaluate Yourself with These 7 Checkpoints

CEOs and Executives routinely ask one of two questions immediately following my coaching kickoff meeting with their team: 1. How do we stack up as leaders compared to your other clients? 2. How closely did our kickoff map to your expectations of us? Both are fantastic mechanisms to elicit feedback, insight, and specific guidance for improvement. But […]

How to Make Yourself and Your Team Indistractable

How to Make Yourself and Your Team Indistractable

I recently interviewed Nir Eyal, tech entrepreneur, former Stanford lecturer, and author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Today, I’m sharing some of Nir’s insights on how leaders can avoid distraction in their work and in their operations to achieve better results. What […]

How to Accelerate Your Growth as a Leader (and Use Science to Do It)

How to Accelerate Your Growth as a Leader (and Use Science to Do It)

I was planning to drive my youngest son Casey to Winthrop University in South Carolina last month for the start of his freshman year. That is, until one Sunday evening about a week before we were set to leave, when he told me he wasn’t comfortable moving to campus. Casey’s concerns were understandable: Universities that […]

Debunking Leadership Myths #11 -- Everything Should Be Predictable

Debunking Leadership Myths #11 -- Everything Should Be Predictable

If you’ve followed my Debunking Leadership Myths Series, you’ve learned about ten common misconceptions that prevent CEOs and executives from unlocking their full potential and becoming the leaders they aspire to be. As a result, perhaps you’ve used some of the free tools and assessments on my website, or ordered my book, Activators: A CEO’s […]

Debunking Leadership Myths #10 -- Behavior Change Is Hard

Debunking Leadership Myths #10 -- Behavior Change Is Hard

The last article in our Debunking Leadership Myths Series challenged the misguided notion that you can—and should—leave your past behind you. If you’ve read all the articles in the series (which starts here), it’s likely that the process of challenging your beliefs required some uncomfortable self-reflection. In sharp contrast, you may find the misconception behind […]

Debunking Leadership Myths #9 -- I Can - and Should - Leave My Past Behind

Debunking Leadership Myths #9 -- I Can - and Should - Leave My Past Behind

The previous installment of the Debunking Leadership Myths Article Series unraveled the misguided perception that employees should be accountable on their own. This article delves deeper to a prevalent – and faulty – belief that causes leaders to suboptimize decision-making, prioritization, firing problem staff, getting accountability right, and more. “I can – and should – […]

Debunking Leadership Myths #8 -- My People Should Be Accountable On Their Own

Debunking Leadership Myths #8 -- My People Should Be Accountable On Their Own

The previous installment of this Debunking Leadership Myths Article Series unpacked the misguided belief that we are already surrounded by the right people. In this article, we tackle another frequent—but faulty—assumption related to people. “My people should be accountable on their own.” Almost every leader I’ve met has some degree of belief in this leadership […]

Debunking Leadership Myths #7 -- I Am Already Surrounded by the Right People

Debunking Leadership Myths #7 — I Am Already Surrounded by the Right People

The previous installment of my Debunking Leadership Myths Article Series focused on the common, yet misguided belief it’s okay to avoid actions that make us uncomfortable. Today, we tackle another frequent—but faulty—assumption: I am already surrounded by the right people. Throughout this article series, using both anecdotal and research-based evidence, we’ve established that a willingness […]

Debunking Leadership Myths #6 -- It’s ok to Avoid Actions That Make Me Uncomfortable

Debunking Leadership Myths #6 -- It’s OK to Avoid Actions That Make Me Uncomfortable

The previous leadership myth article in this series highlighted the importance of inspiration—and just how much it matters. This time, we’re digging into something slightly less pleasant: the impact of discomfort. Many of us have unknowingly allowed ourselves to be lulled into believing Leadership Myth #6: it’s okay to avoid actions that make me uncomfortable. […]

Debunking Leadership Myths #5 -- Inspiration Matters, But Not That Much

Debunking Leadership Myths #5 — Inspiration Matters, But Not That Much

In my last article, we debunked the myth that fear doesn’t matter that much when it comes to the decisions we make and the actions we take at work and beyond. Today, we’ll tackle a myth at the opposite end of the same spectrum: Inspiration matters, but not that much. In truth, feeling inspired is […]

Debunking Leadership Myths #4 -- Fear Matters, But Not That Much

Debunking Leadership Myths #4 -- Fear Matters, But Not That Much

Our last leadership myth focused on our false belief that humans are rational beings. In reality, fear—a survival mechanism passed down to us from our early human ancestors—plays a significant role in our actions and behavior, whether we realize it or not. That brings us to today’s myth: fear matters, but not that much. In […]

Debunking Leadership Myths #3 -- I am Inherently Rational

Debunking Leadership Myths #3 -- I am Inherently Rational

Do you consider yourself rational? Chances are, and assuming you are reasonably sane, the answer is “yes.” You may even find it a bit odd that I asked. And you’re not alone: We humans believe ourselves to be rational creatures. But the assumption that you—and humans at large—are inherently rational is actually our third myth. […]

Debunking Leadership Myths

Debunking Leadership Myths #2 — Experience Does NOT Pay

This second installment of my Leadership Myths series addresses a phrase you may have heard once, twice, or 300 times: Experience pays. You may find that you perpetuate this one yourself. Perhaps you believe that your success is predicated on the years you’ve logged in your industry, or maybe your hiring process is partially based […]

Mark Green - Speaker / Business Coach / Author

Debunking Leadership Myths — How Leadership Actually Works

As a strategic advisor and coach to CEOs and executives, I’ve encountered my fair share of leadership myths. I’ve seen how closely held beliefs about the way business works actually hinder leaders’ abilities to accomplish their goals and reach their fullest potential—often without them even realizing it. This is why it’s useful to debunk common […]

Mark Green - Speaker / Business Coach / Author

A Leadership Framework to Navigate Challenging Times

Sometimes an entire decade of change can occur in an instant. This “decade in an instant” idea perfectly captures how so many of us feel right now, both personally and professionally. We are experiencing an extreme velocity of change, economic and social disruption, unknowns around the COVID-19 pandemic’s duration and severity, personal / family stress, […]

Mark Green - Speaker / Business Coach / Author

How Do You Implement Change?

I’m working with a client executive team to help them transform their culture. They are individually and collectively frustrated that their efforts to date have not affected much change within the geographically distributed 350 person organization. They made some people moves to get the right people in the right seats, they created and rolled out […]

Paying Attention to What Matters Most... Attention

Have you ever had this experience? A friend mentions their intention to buy a certain type of car and then – suddenly – you see those particular cars everywhere. This isn’t magic, but a matter of attention, and it’s the easiest part of you for others to hijack and control without you even realizing it. […]

How to Overcome The Growth Trap

Signs You’re in The Growth Trap Running your business feels like a frustrating vicious cycle – you take 3 steps forward and then 2-3 steps right back again. It may also feel like you’re spinning too many plates at once, and it’s only a matter of time before they start to fall when you’re too exhausted […]

Why I Wrote The Book about Accountability

How often have you been in a work environment that feels like you’re running full out on a treadmill, where everybody — from the front lines to the CEO — works hard, but the view never seems to change? Super frustrating, right? Everyone is sweating, yet it feels like there’s hardly any meaningful progress being […]

How to Hire A Coach

There are 6 factors that I’ve consistently observed to separate “cream of the crop” coaches from the rest. Use them to tip the scales in your favor to find the “right” coach for your business.

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