From the smallest of startups to the C-Suite of global corporations, Dr. Mike Armour has shown thousands of leaders how to step up their game. Now he brings this same wisdom and insight to his audience on Upsize Your Leadership. Every episode explores timeless principles of management, leadership, and personal success. Dr. Mike underscores these principles with engaging stories and interviews with exceptional guests. Whether you’re a C-Suite executive, a veteran manager, or even an aspiring…
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Is powerlessness or power the greatest test of character? The tension in this question is one that every leader eventually faces. Powerlessness exposes who we are when we can’t influence outcomes. Power exposes who we are when nothing stops us. One tests our endurance; the other tests our ethics. And together, they form a complete picture of character that personality alone can never provide. This…
Spotify_Episode_Summary_Short_v1Clarity: The Quiet Currency of Trust Picture one of your best people, walking in proud after three days of work — only to hear five words that undo all of it: "That's not what I wanted." Something breaks. Not the deliverable — their confidence in you. In this episode of Upsize Your Leadership, Dr. Mike Armour argues that for leaders, clarity isn't a communication…
A Culture that Demands Excellence of Itself Four out of five American companies include excellence in their list of core values. Why, then, do we find so much mediocrity in the business world? Companies obviously recognize the importance of excellence. That's why they call it a core value. But it's clearly not important enough for them to embed excellence in their culture. In this episode, Dr.…
The Inner Workings of Engagement Engagement is the art of gaining effort from workers that you cannot demand. If you're like most leaders, there's a metric that you never measure. It's the gap between the least that a person can do without getting in trouble and the most that they are actually cable of giving. Economists call that gap "discretionary effort" — the extra hour that you did not ask…
Picture eight rowers in a single boat. When they're out of sync, the boat doesn't just move slowly — it fights itself. But when they find their rhythm, the boat doesn't go a little faster. It leaps. That's the power of alignment, and it's the most underestimated source of speed in any organization. In this episode, Dr. Mike Armour makes the case that alignment doesn't simply add people's efforts…
This is the third episode in a six-part series examining The Five Essentials of Leadership. It focuses on the second essential: cultivating high trust. Trust rests on credibility, which is a by-product of the first essential, Exemplifying Exceptional Character, the topic of our previous episode. The host Dr. Mike Armour approaches trust as much more than merely a moral virtue. It's is a strategic…
Great leadership begins long before strategy, trust, or culture — it begins with character. In this episode -- the second in our six-part series on the essentials of leadership -- we redefine character not as a list of virtues but as congruence: the full alignment of what you value, what you say, and what you do. Discover the two most dangerous "character gaps" — insincerity and inconsistency —…
Exceptional leadership isn't about perfecting scores of different competencies. It's about understanding and implementing five fundamental principles. When they are developed sequentially and executed correctly, the result is a cascade of positive outcomes across your entire organization. This episode is the first in a series in which Mike introduce these five principles one-by-one. Together they…
In a business landscape defined by speed, disruption, and constant uncertainty, competitive advantage no longer goes to the biggest companies. It goes to the fastest. In this episode of Upsize Your Leadership, Dr. Mike Armour reveals why successful organizations must operate more like combat units trained for maneuver warfare than traditional corporate hierarchies. Drawing from decades of…
As a C-Suite leadership coach for nearly 30 years, I've watched the complexity of executive leadership steadily intensify. In this episode I trace the historical factors that led us to this state of affairs. I explore why today’s C‑Suite environment feels exponentially more complicated than anything leaders faced in previous generations. As I note in the episode, “You’re navigating complexity that…
