During this episode, Shaun McCambridge, Stellar’s Managing Director, sits down with Martin Moore, Founder of Your CEO Mentor and former Chief Executive Office of CS Energy. Martin with his daughter Emma have created Your CEO mentor, - a place where leaders learn the things that they don’t teach at business school. He shares all of his hard-earned leadership experience and learning to good use; mentoring leaders around the globe with practical, no bullshit leadership strategies that will catapult their careers and help them create high performing, results-driven, winning teams. 

Martin’s Highlights

4:00 Martin’s early years

5:44 His own Resilience Journey 

7:10 Techniques for Resilience

9:10 A time of personal resilience building for Martin

12:00 Techniques that Martin has used

13:55 Leaders during COVID

18:05 Creating brain space for leaders

20:45 Remote leadership 

24:26 Creating/continuing a healthy culture during COVID

29:15 Enabling others to meet expectations with all the external factors

49:35 What is next for Martin? 

Martin’s early years

Parents greatly valued education and enrolled him at St Joseph’s College Hunters Hill. 

After school he went to university to study law, where he found himself in an unstructured environment compared to the highly structured one in his early education. As a result, he took time to regain his balance and go back to the values that he had learnt early on.  

His own Resilience Journey 

Never one to dwell on failure or falling short, he always doubled down even from a very young age. 

It was always about giving his very personal best and he always seeked to do better than the day before. 

He realised that one could make big mistakes that weren’t fatal; having no fear from failing is a very important element to being resilient.

Techniques for Resilience

There are a few techniques on how to build personal resilience. 

Focusing on Elements one can control

Not getting too caught up in elements that you can’t control and instead spending time on things that you can makes a huge difference; Martin refers to the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey 

Perspective

Having the perspective on what is going on, no matter how bad the circumstance gets with the pandemic, we will look back 10 years from now and there will be some good learnings and changes. 

A time of personal resilience building for Martin

Martin experienced personal resilience building about 20 years ago. During this time he experienced a period of sustained pressure; he first moved to QLD, had taken on C-level role, was studying for an Executive MBA; during a hostile takeover and he had to handle all of elements at once. 

What he initially thought of doing was to take off one of those elements; however, he wanted to further his career into a more demanding C level role and if couldn’t sustain this, he wouldn’t be able to in the future. Having a reminder that this sustained period of pressure is what future roles would have helped him continue on. At end of it, he had a tremendous amount of confidence knowing that he could step into any situation and handle it. 

Techniques that Martin used

He was in survival mode at times and used 15 minutes to reset.  

He also spent time working on hard constraints and then allowed some elements to be more flexible.

Leaders during COVID

At the moment leaderships skills are being put to the test. The key is to look into outputs, not inputs; concentrating on the value and value alone.

Leaders need to define and articulate what adds value; companies often lose sight of this. It is the leader’s role to eliminate the non-value items and focus on items that will make a difference.

Example: One of the organisations that he worked with had a team that created processes and procedures; the problem was that there was virtually no impact on the outcome; there was a real disconnect. 

In every team needs to be outcome driven such as the processes/procedures need to reduce time, save money etc. 

Creating brain space for leaders

Martin refers to “The Leadership Pipeline: How to build the leadership powered company” by Ram Charan, Steve Dotter and Jim Noel

Leaders need to have brain space to do their jobs; the below Leadership pipeline book breaks down different levels of businesses and giving each level clarification of what they should be concentrating on. 

Many leaders/managers are overcompensating and drilling down too deep for their level which takes away from the role that they should be doing. 

Remote leadership 

Prior and during COVID leaders are still managing people and to do this successfully you need to provide the following framework: 

1)     Clear Expectations

2)     How they are tracking based on those expectations

3)     What their future holds

Usually, you can rely on the micro conversations to further clarify or obtain feedback but COVID has challenged the relationships that rely on this; if you have completed the three above elements it enables flowing leadership conversations.

Creating/continuing a healthy culture during COVID

COVID has added the complexity of different circumstances for each individual e.g. working from home environments

It is about making people aware of the following elements: 

-        The company’s why and linking the purpose 

-        What creates value for the company as a whole

-        What is the strategy in the long term

-        What are tactics the we will use  

-        What the company needs from you today

Every layer of a business then communicates the above but it can potentially change the message from the top, down; so it is really important that one sets the expectation on oneself and check-ins to see how others interpret that day to day.

Enabling others to meet expectations with all the external factors

It comes to down to understanding humans.

If we have open conversations with people and finding a bridge between their personal circumstances and what the organisation needs 

It is ultimately a give and take relationship.

Making the decision to pursue your purpose

About 14 years ago he realised that what he was put on this pla...