NTB group LLC

04/14/2026

Leading with Responsibility: A Daily Check In for Leaders

Leadership isn’t a title or a moment—it’s a daily decision. Every day, leaders face a quiet but powerful question:
Are we focused on rewards, or on responsibilities?

Why it matters: Responsible leadership is about service, duty, and ensuring the long-term well-being of the organization and the people within.
• Leadership is about duty over desire, responsibility over self-gain, the well-being of the organization over the “self”.

How Responsible Leaders Show Up: According to the SkillSet Library (What is Responsibility in Leadership? - Online Business School) the path to successful leadership includes:
• Reality-based: Grounded in truth.
• Integrity-driven: Actions match words.
• Good-focused: Aim to help the most.
• Honesty-centered: Speak the truth.
• Trust-building: Foster and protect relationships.
• Communications: Clear language and focused messages.
These traits aren’t abstract ideals—they’re daily practices that compound over time.

Bottom line: Responsible leadership is not about control. It’s about care. Persuasion triumphs over power. Prioritize persuasion, integrity, and the collective good of the organization( How Leaders Take Responsibility and Inspire Their Teams).
Leaders who prioritize responsibility over reward build stronger teams, healthier cultures, and organizations that endure. A daily self-check matters.

01/12/2026

Back to our Leadership Lessons series for 2026.
This month is Mentorship. Being a mentor is not a title; it's a relationship.

Read the full article on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/sheeperfl/p/mentorship-happens?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

08/02/2025

This month's Leadership Lesson is on Extreme Ownership.
From Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win
by Jocko Willink (Author), Leif Babin (Author), St Martin's Press 2017

Taking ownership for mistakes and failures is hard.

Why This Matters
- Doing so is key to learning, to developing solutions, and ultimately, to victory.
- By taking ownership, checking their egos, and accepting blame for difficulties, one repairs relationships and gain the trust of others.
- The only meaningful measure for a leader is whether the team succeeds or fails.
- The leader must own everything in his or her world. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.
- There are no bad teams; only bad leaders.

What's Next
When leaders embrace Extreme Ownership and drive teams to a higher standard of performance, as a leader it is not what you preach but rather what you tolerate.
If substandard performance is accepted and nobody is accountable, poor performance becomes the standard. The leader must pull different elements from within the team together to support one another with all focused on how to best accomplish the mission.

The Bottom Line
* Be humble. A leader who thinks it "my way or the highway" will instantly lose team respect.
* You have to listen to the team because that helps the leader connect and build relationships.
* Leadership is both art and science.
* A good leader must be confident but not cocky, a leader AND a follower. A good leader has nothing to prove, but everything to prove.

06/20/2025

Some good informational sessions from the NWS.

🌀 Hurricane season is here. Are you ready?
✅ Join NWS meteorologists July 21–24 for FREE virtual tropical training sessions designed to help you prepare.
⏰ 11am, 1pm & 7pm EDT
🔗 More Information: weather.gov/jax/FloridaTropicalTrainingWeek2025
📌

05/25/2025

This week's Leadership Lesson is about the Cost of Unclear Communications

The Cost of Unclear Communications

Most of us never learned how to communicate clearly in the workplace. We picked it up by watching others. If we liked/agreed with it that may be a technique we used. Too often we resort to "politeness". Poor or unclear communications create employee stress, causes delays and missed goals, and creates obstacles to success.

Why This Matters:
Politeness and vagueness can soften the message, but it can also blur the clarity. A direct request, an order can come across as a vague suggestion. According to The Economist Intelligence Unit The Economist, 2018 "Communication Barriers in the Modern Workplace", PDF https://tinyurl.com/yfpw54dw):
- Poor communication is having a tremendous impact on the workplace.
- The most frequently cited cause of communication barriers is fundamentally human: different communication styles.
- The use of instant messaging and social media at work reflects a gap between how generations use certain communication tools.
- There is a discrepancy between the communication tools that people find most effective and the ones they regularly use.
- An employee’s place in the pecking order affects the fallout they face from poor communication.

What's Next:
Some actions we can take will to be better communicators from the Harvard Business School:
- Use active Listening: Effective leaders know when they need to talk and, more importantly, when they need to listen.
- Transparency: By speaking openly about the company’s goals, opportunities, and challenges, leaders can build trust amongst their team and foster an environment where employees feel empowered to share their ideas and collaborate.
- Clarity: When communicating with employees, speak in specifics. Define the desired result of a project or strategic initiative and be clear about what you want to see achieved by the end of each milestone.
- Empathy: In a study by BussinessSolver, 96 percent of respondents said it was important for their employers to demonstrate empathy, yet 92 percent claimed it remains undervalued. If you want to improve your communication and build a stronger, more productive culture, practice responding with empathy.
- Feedback: Asking for feedback from your team can not only help you grow as a leader but build trust among your colleagues. It’s critical, though, that you don’t just listen to the feedback. You also need to act on it.

The Bottom Line:
The long-term payoff isn’t just a happier employee or satisfied customer – it’s a stronger, more engaged workforce and, ultimately, a healthier, more
robust work culture.

05/06/2025

This week's Leadership Lesson: Adaptability is Resilience
From: Divine, M., (2020). Staring down the wolf: 7 leadership commitments that forge elite teams. (e-book) New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group. That’s adaptability (p. 262-263).”

Zen master Nakamura once wrote, "Fall down seven times, get up eight," emphasizing not just the act of rising, but how well you rise.

Why it matters: Adapting quickly is crucial in overcoming life's setbacks.
• Reacting negatively prolongs instability.
• Resilience is about learning from each fall, emerging stronger.

The big picture: Many falter by dwelling on failure or fearing judgment from others.
• Others may revel in your missteps, but true strength lies in how you respond.

Be smart: Respond to setbacks optimistically and learn from each experience.
• This approach fosters growth and resilience, enabling you to face challenges with confidence.

The bottom line: Fall down seven times, get up eight – stronger, better, and more capable, having learned everything possible from the situation.

What does it take to create that elite team of individuals?
It requires a commitment to seven key principles: Courage, Trust, Respect, Growth, Excellence, Resiliency, and Alignment. All of these are present in an elite team which commits to them deeply in order to forge the character worthy of uncommon success. Elite teams challenge themselves to step up every day to do the uncommon. Developing the principles yourself and aligning your team around these commitments will allow you to thrive in VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) environments, no matter your background or leadership experience.

We know the skills that elite leaders need right now. But the fear wolf gets in the way. The fear wolf is a metaphor for those emotions, deep seated fears, and innate biases that hold us back.

Retired Navy SEAL Commander, entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author Mark Divine (founder of SEALFIT, NavySeal.com, and Unbeatable Mind) reveals what makes the culture of an elite team, and how to get your own team to commit to serve at an elite level. Using principles, he learned on the battlefield, training SEALs, and in his own entrepreneurial and growth company ventures, Mark knows what it is to lead elite teams, and how easily the team can fail by breaching these commitments.

03/05/2025

This week's Leadership Lesson is "Collaboration is necessary for teamwork".

From: Tamm, J.W., & Luyet, R.J. (2019). Radical collaboration: five essential skills to overcome defensiveness and build successful relationships. 2nd edition (e-book). New York: Harper Business.

Collaborative skills have never been more important to a company’s success and these skills are essential for every worker today.

“Strong collaborative skills increase enthusiasm among team members, departments, customers, suppliers, and partners. "You can't compete externally if you can't first collaborate internally".

Collaborative skills leverage:
• the effectiveness of all relationships, and
• healthy environments, in contrast to the toxic effect of conflicted relationships.

Organizations today are advocating for more:
• flexibility in people’s roles.
• acceptance of change at a faster pace,
• shared decision making and creative problem solving.
• trust from teams who must constantly redefine their tasks.
The bottom line: Organizations unwilling to support individuals and teams in building collaborative relationships, end up managing inevitable conflict and negativity (p. 34-35).”

https://tinyurl.com/yfhb23z7

02/28/2025

There seems to be a wealth of misinformation out there about the current measles epidemic. It is important to know the facts and what medical doctors know about measles. Read the following and you will get some idea of the medical science.

https://deplatformdisease.substack.com/p/malicious-measles-myths-memory-holing?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=26n3i&fbclid=IwY2xjawIukqZleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHflOopQ5KBzbanVzlkTq1UZUriUaZRj8-1kKa-JHeK1uHl1jbFwL0imUqw_aem_tifCkiYVkdLg9iCzYVA-IA&triedRedirect=true

Measles is already having a great 2024. We ought to put a stop to that.

02/18/2025

This week's Leadership Lesson

"No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care." Theodore Roosevelt

What
Caring Leadership is more art than science. It starts with leaders actually CARING for those we lead!

Why
Caring for people means that we care for them for their own good. We are committed to seeing them succeed for themselves, not just for what they can do for us, our team, or organization. People pay attention to our actions, words, and even what we fail to say. We must be intentional about what they see and hear

How to Start
The first step in becoming a caring leader is to want to make a change in leadership behavior.

Why it’s important
Leadership is an evolutionary process. Mistakes are opportunities to learn and grow into a caring leader

From: Younger, H. (2021). The art of caring leadership. (e-book) Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, Publishers, Inc.

01/21/2025

This week's Leadership Lesson is the "Law of Influence".

From The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership (John C. Maxwell, 2022)

"If you don't have influence, you will never be able to lead others" (page 13).

One of the most effective leaders of the late 20th century was anything but impressive upon first appearance.
When people think of Mother Teresa they see a little, frail, old woman dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor. But she was a tremendous leader
And that was because of the amazing amount of influence she had with others.

Why it matters
* A boss tells workers what they need to do. A leader inspires workers to do more than they need to do.
* Not every boss is a leader and not every leader is a boss.

The bottom line
* * "Leadership is influence - nothing more, nothing less". (page 14)