Upsize Your Leadership
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 leader, you will always find practical, actionable ideas on Upsize Your Leadership.
Episodes
October 30, 2025 • 23 mins
In this episode Dr. Mike challenges conventional approaches to performance metrics by highlighting their limitations in a rapidly changing world.
Using Nokia’s dramatic fall from market dominance as a cautionary tale, he arguex that traditional business scorecards often measure the wrong things—relying too heavily on past performance to forecast what lies ahead.
KPIs and automated scorecards reflect historical success but fail ...
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April 3, 2025 • 22 mins
Building Trust Builds Customer Loyalty
Research consistently confirms that customers will pay more for a product or service if they trust the provider. Companies should therefore cease on every opportunity to foster a climate in which trust can flourish.
Customer loyalty never takes root where trust in a brand or company is low. And trust takes shape only in settings where ethics are held in high regard.
This episode explores fi...
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March 19, 2025 • 18 mins
The Staggering Challenge of Rebuilding Ukraine
For the first time in years, the possibility of peace in Ukraine is in the headlines. Ignored in most media coverage, however, is the immense complexity of getting the country back on its feet economically, industrially, and in terms of fundamental services.
In this episode, I examine realities that are unknown by most Americans, but are momentous challenges that Ukraine's postwar go...
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February 14, 2025 • 20 mins
Five Essential Mindset Changes as You Climb the Management Ladder
Have you known people with tremendous promise as managers or leaders whose careers got derailed and they never rose to the heights that they seemed destined for? No doubt you have. And as a leadership development coach, I’ve seen plenty of them.
Of course, we could cite hosts of reasons why this happens. From what I’ve observed, failure to make appropriate change i...
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February 5, 2025 • 19 mins
Four Things that Pacesetting Leaders Get Right
Our business world is not merely competitive. It's hypercompetitive. Run-of-the-mill performance is no longer acceptable. To stay ahead, companies need leaders who build and maintain sustained high performance.
Over two decades ago, I began studying leaders who had done
that very thing. I started to identify common denominators in organizations –
both profit and nonprofit – which ha...
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January 28, 2025 • 18 mins
A Supreme Court Decision That Changed Nothing
The Future of the Beneficial Ownership Information Report Remains Uncertain
After bouncing around in district and appeals courts for months, the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) and its mandated Beneficial Ownership Information Report had their first day before the Supreme Court this month.
On January 23, the Court lifted a temporary restraining order (TRO) which had suspended enforce...
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January 24, 2025 • 17 mins
What Managers Should Always Remember About Their People
One of the shortcomings of modern accounting systems is that they have no mechanism for showing the capability and dedication of your workforce as an asset on a balance sheet. Workers appear only as liabilities: payrolls due, cost of benefits, Social Security obligations, etc.
Yet workers are the manager's most valuable asset. That's one of seven things that I feature in this...
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January 17, 2025 • 21 mins
Five Ways Managers Can Combat Distrust in the Workplace
Recent studies confirm that worker distrust of the company and its managers is solidly entrenched.
These studies found that fewer than half of employees trust their manager. And only one in three trusts upper management.
In today's episode I examine some historic roots of this distrust. It gained its foothold in the business and corporate world in the 1980s. I trace what ha...
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January 9, 2025 • 21 mins
Beneficial Ownership Information Report
The Latest Legal Maneuvers
As I predicted in my podcast two weeks ago, the court challenge to the Beneficial Ownership Information Report has now made its way to the steps of the Supreme Court.
At the time of my previous podcast regarding this case, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had given assent to a nationwide temporary restraining order on the Corporate Transparency Act, which is...
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January 2, 2025 • 19 mins
Why I Quit Asking People for Buy-In
Here's What I Want Instead
I've dropped "buy-in" from my leadership vocabulary. I guess I've led to many initiatives where people "bought in," but never became engaged.
We all buy into great causes, but never become actively involved. For example, everyone buys into the value of ending world hunger. But only a few ever take up the fight personally.
Both within organizations and in the broader ...
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December 27, 2024 • 16 mins
Beginning shortly after Thanksgiving, I've been on a roller coaster ride, along with the owners of about 37 million other small businesses in the U.S.
Constitutional challenges to the Corporate Transparency Act have been making their way through the court system. In rapid-fire fashion judicial decisions have been made, then reversed, followed in short order by a reversal of the reversal.
The result is widespread confusion as to w...
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April 6, 2024 • 12 mins
Tales from a Total Solar Eclipse in Siberia
Two Very Funny Stories
I live just north of Dallas, so we are in the direct path of this month's complete solar eclipse. It's all the buzz around here.
I'm sure that the event will spin off lots of personal stories as people relate what happened around them during the eclipse. But I doubt that any of these stories will top two of mine from my last total eclipse. And they won't be nearly a...
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March 28, 2024 • 30 mins
War in Ukraine: What the Final Outcome May Look Like
Now that the spring thaw has begun in Ukraine, the year's most intense season of combat is about to start. How will this war end? It's almost anyone's guess.
But whatever the outcome, it will be shaped by the influence of the backstories which we've focused on in the last three podcasts. With this episode, we bring the series to a conclusion by examining the prospects for both Ru...
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March 19, 2024 • 32 mins
Russian Perspectives on the War
The Historical Backdrop
This is the third program in a four-part series examining historical and cultural factors which shape the backdrop against which the war in Ukraine is playing out. Having devoted the first two programs to Ukrainian perspectives, in this one we shift to how Russia views both the war and Ukrainians themselves.
For reasons which I explain in this episode, there is a paranoia that...
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March 6, 2024 • 24 mins
Ukraine's Newfound Patriotic Zeal
An Unintended Gift from Putin
It's clear that neither Vladimir Putin nor his war planners ever anticipated the strength and the tenacity of Ukraine's resistance to the Russian invasion.
A war which the Russians expected to last a few hours or days has now entered its third year, and Russian offensives have been stymied month after month.
What explains this Ukrainian determination to in the face of ...
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February 29, 2024 • 20 mins
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, I worked extensively in both Russia and Ukraine. I managed offices and staffs in both countries and interacted closely with everyone from the most common laborers to top government officials.
Not only that, my duties required me to travel widely in Russia and from corner to corner of Ukraine. I became intimately acquainted with how Ukrainians feel about Russia and how Russians feel about ...
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February 16, 2024 • 19 mins
The Action Agenda for Every Leader
This is the fourth episode in a series examining the meaning of leadership. Previous programs explored the people-centric nature of leadership and the orchestrating role of purpose at the heart of the leader's endeavor.
This final episode in the series examines the three-part action agenda which every leader must carry out. First is to rally people around the purpose. Then motivate them to pursue ...
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February 8, 2024 • 20 mins
How We Developed a Muddled Concept of Leadership
In my early 20s, when I began conducting trainings on leadership, few books on the subject existed. The business world was somewhat exclusive enthralled with management, and that was reflected in the inventory choices at the typical bookstore.
It would be another 20 years before Warren Bemis and others began publishing works which drew a sharp distinction between management and leade...
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January 18, 2024 • 19 mins
Implications of Viewing Leadership as Art
Last week we began parsing the definition of leadership which I developed 20 years ago: Leadership is the art of rallying people around a shared purpose, then motivating them and mobilizing them to achieve it..
In that episode, we examined the import of the terms "people" and "shared purpose." This week we take up a third term: "art."
Last week we examined two key terms from my definition o...
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January 11, 2024 • 16 mins
Leadership: Anchored in People and Purpose
Any quick search on the internet will uncover dozens of definitions of leadership. Some are more appropriate to leadership at very high levels than they are to leadership in day-to-day life.
About 20 years ago, I developed a definition intended to capture the essence of leadership wherever its found: Leadership is the art of rallying people around a shared purpose, then motivating them and...
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