No Bullsh!t Leadership

Your ability to give quality feedback is one of the biggest predictors of leadership success. But many leaders never master the art of difficult conversations. 

Like many things in leadership, business, and life, nothing beats taking consistent, focused action. 

In this Moment, I give you 6 tips to get you off the starting line, and build your confidence quickly. 

If you want to take a deeper dive into the art of giving feedback, have a listen to Ep.22: Feedback Made Easy.

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The 7 Leadership Blind Spots, one a day:

You may think that you’re highly resilient, an expert at staying calm under pressure… but your team could be experiencing something completely different. They're the ones who see your lack of composure.

If you panic, that leaks onto your team. And every minute they spend managing your mood is a minute they don't spend delivering results. 

This is the final instalment in our 7-part series, recut from a live workshop I ran called Stop Rescuing Your Underperformers. I've been looking at one leadership blind spot each day.

There's a perso...

When you hesitate on an important decision, it’s rarely due to missing data or insufficient consultation. It's more likely because you're afraid of getting it wrong.

And as long as you delay, your people have to wait. There may be a whole string of decisions below you that can’t be made until you make yours… and if your people have to wait too long, they may just stop chasing you.

This is Day 6 of a 7-part series, recut from a live workshop I ran called Stop Rescuing Your Underperformers. I'm looking at one...

One of your critical jobs as a leader is to absorb the ambiguity that you’re facing, and turn that into certainty for your people.

If you can’t do that, your team will freeze; and a frozen team just looks like an underperforming team.

This is Day 5 of a 7-part series, recut from a live workshop I ran called Stop Rescuing Your Underperformers. I'm looking at one leadership blind spot each day.

There's a person on your team who isn't delivering, and the premise I'm exploring this week is that...

When you reward long hours, instead of rewarding the results that make a difference, you're paying for effort instead of value.

You can't hold someone accountable for delivery, when you've never told them what's worth delivering.

This is Day 4 of a 7-part series, recut from a live workshop I ran called Stop Rescuing Your Underperformers. I'm looking at one leadership blindspot each day.

There's a person on your team who isn't delivering, and the premise I'm exploring this week is that they're more likely to be a symptom of the...

When you rewrite one of your people's reports at 9pm, you're not just compensating for their weakness. You're reinforcing it.

That report was their chance to learn how to do it properly. You took it on because you wanted it done right.

This is Day 3 of a 7-part series, recut from a live workshop I ran called Stop Rescuing Your Underperformers. I'm looking at one leadership blind spot each day.

There's a person on your team who isn't delivering, and the premise I'm exploring this week is that they're more...

When you have an underperformer on your team, but you haven’t given them specific performance feedback, you're reinforcing their underperformance. 

They may think that no news is good news, and they don’t need to do anything different.

This is Day 2 of a 7-part series, recut from a live workshop I ran called Stop Rescuing Your Underperformers. I’m looking at one leadership blind spot each day.

There's a person on your team who isn't delivering, and the premise I’m exploring this week is that they're more likely to be a s...

Somewhere on your team right now there's a person who isn't delivering. You thought of their name before you got to the end of that sentence.

Over the next seven days, I'm going to show you they're probably not your problem. They're a symptom of it.

This is Day 1 of a seven part series, recut from a live workshop I ran called Stop Rescuing Your Underperformers. One leadership blind spot a day, for seven days.

Today it's number one, and it's the big one. Accountability. I've taught this for almost...

When you feel swamped and overwhelmed, it’s easy to go home and kick the cat. 

But if you learn to compartmentalise, you’ll find it much easier to leave the stress of work at work (and vice versa).

In this Moment, I give you 3 tips to build greater resilience, by developing your compartmentalisation skills.

If you want to take a deeper dive into how to compartmentalise successfully, have a listen to Ep.303: Navigating Wicked Problems.

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You can connect with me at:

Website: https://ww...

We asked 800 leaders one question. What's actually hard about leadership right now?

The answers were so good we decided to answer them live. No prep. No script. Em fires the questions, and I get two minutes on each.

These are real questions from real leaders in our free Skool community, the No Bullsh!t Leadership Hub (https://www.skool.com/nblh).

16 questions, 16 answers. And every one of them comes back to the same thing: whether your team can perform without you.

If your team faced a major...

Being promoted to a new leadership level is a difficult transition to make. But it’s even tougher when you’re promoted to lead the team you used to be part of.

The biggest trap is that you might take the culture, the capability, and the performance of that team for granted.

This Moment gives you some ways to combat your status quo thinking, and set the scene for meaningful performance improvement.

If you want to take a deeper dive into how you can change the paradigm when you have to l...

Every time you fill a vacancy, you have to make a choice: do you promote someone from within, who you may know quite well, or take a punt on someone you don’t? 

Over my corporate career, I made both calls frequently. Sometimes, I got to pat myself on the back for how brilliant I was, but occasionally the resulting hire was so disastrous that I looked like a complete muppet in front of my team (and my boss)!

Most leaders have no real way of determining who might be ready for promotion… it’s...

There are three costs of leadership that nobody tells you about when you get promoted; and they are a given.

You can no more change them than you can avoid the pull of gravity.

The best leaders accept these truths. They do the work to become comfortable in navigating them each day, knowing they are strong enough to pay that price.

If you want to take a deeper dive into the toll that great leaders are prepared to pay, have a listen to Ep.385: Paying the Price of Leadership

When leaders are unhappy at work, they often blame the company. But more often it’s a sign of dissatisfaction with their own inability to work within the constraints of the job. 

No job is perfect. Every role comes with constraints: things that stop you from operating at your best. 

Whether it’s a bad boss, a lack of resources, or unrealistic expectations, the question isn't whether your job has constraints: it's whether or not you can live with them.

If you don’t proactively manage the constraints then, over time, yo...

Speed can be a performance multiplier, if you can build it into your culture. 

But there are going to be times when you need to back off… and part of being a great leader is recognising those times.

If you want to take a deeper dive into when you should slow down, have a listen to Ep.294: Is Faster Always Better?

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You can connect with me at:

Website: https://www.yourceomentor.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yourceomentor

Instagram: https...

If you're leading leaders, accountability is the first thing that breaks. You're not overloaded. You just rely too much on your own individual brilliance to get results. Until you learn to lead your leaders better, you'll never get out of the spin cycle.

A few weeks ago, Em and I sat in a room with six CEOs we've been working with for the better part of a year. We asked each of them to rate their own leadership performance, as founder CEOs, on a scale of 1 to 10. When it came to how well they'd built a...

McLaren won back-to-back F1 championships when the CEO replaced victimhood and blame with a culture that guaranteed top shelf performance.

That wasn’t luck. He made deliberate decisions… hard decisions… that changed what was actually possible.

There isn’t a team on the planet that can’t improve its performance. But it takes a strong leader, who’s committed to building a “no blame, no excuses” culture.

If you want to take a deeper dive on what it takes to build top shelf performance, have a listen to Ep.344: Building a Winning Team C...

If you look at the spectacular results that Tesla has achieved as a business, it might entice you to try to emulate Elon Musk’s leadership approach. 

But that would most likely be disastrous. People love to romanticise the image of the founder who’s so deep in the detail that he can solve the toughest technical problems better than his own engineers. 

How many LinkedIn posts extol the virtues of entrepreneurs who lead like this? But for 99.9% of leaders, this could never work. 

In this episode, I pull the princip...

There are 3 success principles that are particularly relevant for the new world we’re leading in. And they have nothing to do with luck, talent, or connections!

As labour markets change in the coming years on the back of AI, these principles need to be rock solid, if you want to succeed.

If you want to take a deeper dive on success principles, have a listen to Ep.384: How to Make Success Inevitable

Links mentioned in the episode:

Ep.384: How to Make Success Inevitable

Ep.138: It...

Can you explain clearly why the people on your team are paid what they're being paid? If you can't, you may have a hidden problem eating away at your meritocracy. 

We've produced a few episodes over the years on remuneration structures, particularly how to link incentives to performance. This episode is all about the gap between what people believe about merit-based pay, and what actually happens when you try to put that into practice. 

Timing… negotiation skill… historical anomalies… skill shortages… there's a long list of barriers that conspire to stop you from paying peo...

The psychological contract is the mutual understanding between an employer and employee about their respective obligations to each other.

There are no rules for these contracts: they’re based purely on people's perceptions, and they exist in people’s heads, not in formal documents.

No matter how hard you work to keep your people happy, it's never enough: privileges just become entitlements. But there are three things that actually do make a difference… and they cost you nothing.

If you want to make sure your people feel valued, have a listen...

Underperformers don't change because you ask them nicely. They only change when they can no longer avoid the consequences of not delivering.

Every time you swoop in and rescue someone, you’re filling that performance gap on their behalf. At the same time, you’re reinforcing the fact that they never have to meet an acceptable standard, if they don’t want to. 

You might think you're just delivering the outcome: but you’re also unintentionally condoning unacceptable performance.

As the leader, you’re responsible for the culture… and that’s a cancer in y...

As a corporate executive and CEO, the 1:1 meeting was the single most powerful weapon I had in my leadership arsenal. It was here that I mobilised my direct reports to excel.

But even with that focus, I still left a lot to chance. It wasn’t until much later that I learned a technique to lock in people’s commitment to deliver.

If you want to get more mileage from your 1:1s, there are three questions you can ask at the end that will wildly increase the chances of your direct reports delivering.

Your top talent doesn't always quit because they're unhappy. Often, they simply can’t see what their next move is. And if that’s the case, it’s not their fault: it’s yours!

Every leader I talk to at the moment is obsessed with retention; it feels like it's getting harder for them to hold onto their top performers. Job tenures are declining, but the averages often mask the real story. 

In this episode, I explain why a scarcity mindset entices good leaders to do dumb sh!t, by playing defence at exactly t...

Most job interviews are just friendly chats. They don’t provide any real due diligence.

Making the right hiring choice requires a lot more than résumés and reference checks. Even personality profiling has limited utility.

If you want to work out whether someone can actually do the job, you need to get good at interviewing.

If you want to reduce the risk of hiring a dud, have a listen to Ep.379: Interview Questions to Expose the Bullshitters

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You can connect with me at:

Websit...

Meetings can be a political minefield, and most leaders rely purely on their instinct to get by: which means they get it wrong more often than they realise.

This episode cuts through the noise on one of the most deceptively complex leadership skills: knowing when to talk and when to shut up. It sounds simple, but It isn't: and The Economist's "Babble Hypothesis" proves why getting the balance wrong can derail your career.

In this episode, I lay out a practical framework for two meeting scenarios that matter most: when you're in the...

Leadership might be hard, but there’s nothing you can’t master with application and discipline. This is why the toughest challenge is often just convincing yourself to start.

In this Moment, I show you exactly how to overcome the comfort of inaction, and push yourself to do the things that will ultimately pay off.

I don’t care if you’re an introvert, or if you get anxiety… this is about realising your long-term career ambitions.

If you want to really get stuck into the psychology of taking that first smal...

When we think about high-performing teams, we assume they have superior strategies and top-class talent. But one characteristic we often overlook is pace. And pace doesn’t happen organically: it takes a leader to build momentum into the culture.

The best teams have a relentless drive to get things done; a bias for action that cuts through everything they do. A team that has momentum feels entirely different, and once you’ve been on a team like that, everything else will feel second-rate.

The problem is that, despite all the posturing and empty clai...

Team building exercises don’t build teams. Only leadership does.

If you’re thinking about investing in time away from the office, think again. These days don’t move the needle on team dynamics, trust, or performance. If you dislike someone before the paintball game, you'll still dislike them after it.

So by all means, take your team out for some fun. Just don't mistake it for culture change.

For practical tips on how to avoid expensive team building mistakes, have a listen to Ep.170: Epic Team Building Fails

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Have you ever sat in a meeting about AI, nodded along, then thought, "I've got no idea what they're talking about, and I'm meant to be leading this"? If so, you're in good company.

In this episode, I chat with Em and AI expert James Killick to answer the question every leader is quietly asking. In 2026, does AI get you promoted, or replaced?

Here's the truth. AI isn't coming for leaders. It's coming for the leaders who live in the detail and do the work of the people below them. Your job hasn't...

Virtually every leader likes to talk about empowering their team. But if you were to ask 10 of them what empowerment actually means, you’d get 11 different answers. 

Over the years, the concept of empowerment has been dumbed down to make it vague and aspirational. 

True empowerment is neither of those things. It's a core driver of performance, and in this Moment, I give you my number one tip for not accidentally killing it.

For practical tips on effectively empowering your people, have a listen to Ep.374: The Biggest Killer of Empo...

Talented jerks and people who game the system just need to go. 

The value they bring through their technical skill is massively outweighed by the damage they do to the rest of the team.

You can't motivate them. 

You can't inspire them. 

You can't lift them. So stop trying!

Because while you hold onto the person destroying your culture, your good people are quietly working out that there's an easier way to earn a living somewhere else.

In this Q&A episode we cov...

Your best people know they have plenty of options, so if they don’t feel the work they’re doing is valuable, challenging, and impactful, it doesn't matter how much you pay them. 

In this Moment, I give you 5 things you need to do to keep them.

For practical tips on how to hold onto your talent, have a listen to Ep.101: Keeping the Ones You’ve Got

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Is your team performing at the standard it should be?

✨ Join Marty and Em for The Mid-Year Leadership Reset...

Most leaders DREAD the formal performance review; because they don’t prepare and they don’t know what to expect. Today I go deep on how to control the dialogue, so that your review becomes a career accelerator, rather than a spirited defense of your failings.

Let’s face it: you know your performance hasn’t been perfect, so it’s easy to agonise over how your boss might evaluate you.

This makes it tempting to just throw yourself at your boss’s mercy, and plead for leniency, hoping the good will outweigh the not-so-g...

Empathy is a critical leadership capability: without it, you’ll never get the best out of your people. 

But if you’re not strong enough to hold the standard, that empathy will blow up in your face. Empathy builds trust; sympathy destroys performance.

For practical tips on how to stay out of the sympathy zone, have a listen to Ep.135: When Empathy Becomes Sympathy

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Have you taken our free Leadership Blindspot test?

✨ In just 5 minutes you’ll uncover the hidden leadership habits holding you back.

Get your...

Most leaders think high turnover is a retention problem. But it’s not; it's a leadership problem. And the fix is the exact opposite of what most leaders do.

Staff turnover is still widely misunderstood. And most leaders operate from a place of fear, responding to it defensively.

They tiptoe around their people, lower the standards, and tolerate poor performance so they don't rock the boat. But, ironically, this is the worst thing you could possibly do for your retention problem. 

In this episode I give you my views on how...

If you think great leaders don't need to be great managers, you've probably got a blindspot…and it's costing you more than you know.

To lift performance, you have to put desirable leadership attributes aside, and learn to manage better.

To access my 6 key levers of execution excellence, have a listen to Ep.371: How I learned to Produce Exceptional Results

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Have you taken our free Leadership Blindspot test?

✨ In just 5 minutes you’ll uncover the hidden leadership habits holding you back.

Get your Blindspot Sco...

When CEOs cut management layers, they often kid themselves that they're building leaner, faster companies. 

But what they're actually doing is destroying accountability and weakening performance. Hiding behind fads like player-coach leadership can’t change that fact.

The tech sector loves a management fad and over the years, they’ve tried them all. But the unquestioning adoption (and eventual discarding) of these management trends doesn’t seem to discourage them from trying the next one that comes along.

In this episode, I pull this apart from a few different angles. I look...

In business, it’s an indisputable fact that stronger competition results in better outcomes for everyone. Why are we so reluctant, then, to increase competitive pressure within our teams?

One of the most critical performance levers of leadership is differentiation between people; and creating a merit-based, competitive environment within your team benefits every stakeholder… especially your people. 

If you want to go deeper on how to increase healthy competition in your team, have a listen to Ep.179: Survival of the Fittest

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Have you taken our free Leadership Blindspot test?

Charisma is sold to us as a divine gift that you’re either born with… or not. 

We bandy the word around quite a bit… and even though charisma comes with some negative connotations, most of us wish we had more of it.

Describing the things that make up charisma can be difficult: It’s quite an intangible concept, which is why it’s so easy to fall back on observable, physical attributes, like height, confidence, wardrobe choices, and tone of voice.

This tells you less about charisma, and more about our d...