Upsize Your Leadership

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

Your Use of Power: The Stress Test for Character

August 13, 2026 • 18 mins
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 episode breaks down...
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Tasking Miscues that Cost Leaders Trust

August 6, 2026 • 24 mins
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 skill — it's a ...
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Leadership, Culture, and Excellence

July 30, 2026 • 29 mins
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. Mike Armour shows why. A cultur...
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How Much Are Disengaged Workers Costing You?

July 21, 2026 • 32 mins
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 for, the creative fix outsi...
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A Company's Greatest Speed Boost

July 9, 2026 • 22 mins
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 together — it multipli...
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UYL2606 -- Cultivating Trust as a Leader

July 1, 2026 • 28 mins
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 advantage. In today’s h...
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UYL2604 Exemplify Exceptional Character

June 17, 2026 • 25 mins
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 — and why people ...
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A Leader's Success Hinges on Five Essentials

June 2, 2026 • 26 mins
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 form an integrated, interacti...
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Executive Leadership: Maneuver Warfare in a Suit

April 29, 2026 • 15 mins
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 leadership experience and his background ...
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How Executive Leadership Became So Complex

April 22, 2026 • 21 mins
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 is not just dif...
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A Flawed Assumption in Trump's Peace Plan

December 23, 2025 • 12 mins
In this episode, Dr. Mike Armour examines what he sees as a major miscalculation at the heart of the Trump Administration’s proposed peace plan for the Russia‑Ukraine war. Drawing on years of firsthand experience in both nations, he challenges a prevailing assumption in the U.S. negotiating strategy. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he managed widespread humanitarian efforts in both Russia and Ukraine. His o...
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Business Scorecards Have a Blindspot

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 succe...
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Trust: The Key to Customer Loyalty

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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Postwar Ukraine: The Challenges

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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To Climb the Ladder, Change Your Mindset

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 appropri...
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Four Pillars of Pacesetting Leadership

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 &nda...
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Beneficial Owner Report: Going Away? Or Coming Back?

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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Seven Things Good Managers Don't Forget

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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Disarming Workplace Distrust: Five Leadership Countermeasures

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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Latest Turns in the Beneficial Ownership Court Case

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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