Insight
Martha Vogler has spent much of her career working with senior leaders facing ambitious goals. As a Delivery Lead at JMW, she is now also helping to standardise Shaping the Future TM, JMW’s flagship enterprise organizational performance offering. The work helps executive teams get clear about the business results they are committed to achieving, identify what may be limiting performance and define measurable evidence of progress.
When Martha joined JMW almost 15 years ago, she was single and had no children. Today, her life feels unrecognizable, and as she puts it, she is in “full-blown mommy mode” when she is not working.
Her professional starting point was different too. She began her career as a registered nurse before earning her MBA and moving into consulting, initially focused on mergers and acquisitions and more conventional strategy and performance work. The years since have changed where she looks when a leader or organization is struggling to make something happen.
Two things have become particularly important to her: freedom and impact.
Impact, for Martha, means seeing your commitments realized. That starts with being clear about what you are committed to and what evidence would show that it is actually happening. For her personally, there is fulfilment in knowing that her work has genuinely contributed to something meaningful and produced a tangible difference.
That same thinking sits behind some of the work she is doing on Shaping the Future today, where she is helping to make the connection between a client’s commitments and measurable evidence of their realization more consistent.
Freedom is closely connected. It comes from recognizing what is shaping your choices, especially when a belief has become so familiar that nobody thinks to question it.
That is often where the interesting work with leaders starts.
Senior leaders operate with real constraints. Some come from the wider organization while others develop slowly through years of experience and become accepted as simply the way things work.
The problem comes when a constraint turns into a conclusion about what is possible.
Martha saw this while working with the executive team of a large global professional services business. During one session, the group was asked a difficult question: what do you genuinely believe is impossible for your business?
The conversation eventually turned to corporate performance measures. These were highly experienced executives running an important part of the business, yet they had come to believe they had very little ability to influence some of the measures being set elsewhere in the organization.
That belief mattered.
If something appears impossible, why would you spend time trying to change it? People learn to tolerate or work around the constraint instead. If something appears impossible for long enough, people stop experiencing it as a constraint at all. It becomes a reality: that’s just the way it is around here. Eventually, the assumption beneath it can disappear from view altogether.
Bringing it back into the conversation does not magically remove the constraint. It gives leaders the chance to examine it.
That distinction is important to Martha because it restores choice.
A leader might leave the room facing exactly the same corporate requirement as before. But there may now be questions they had stopped asking, or conversations they had assumed were unavailable to them.
Sometimes the first shift in performance is simply that something previously treated as fixed becomes discussable again.
Sometimes the obstacle to performance is an initiative designed to improve it. Martha encountered a version of this with an energy business that had recently changed ownership.
One part of the company consisted of established assets that were performing well. Elsewhere in the business sat a major new industrial facility that had struggled to operate reliably.
Across the organization, there was a strong focus on optimization.
For the established operations, that was entirely reasonable. The same approach made far less sense for a facility still trying to achieve consistent production.
The organization nevertheless found itself applying the wider agenda to both.
Commercial teams were looking for ways to improve returns while those responsible for the new facility were dealing with a more immediate question: could they get it running reliably enough to produce and eventually sell what it was designed to make?
The breakthrough for the executive team was recognizing that their broad push for optimization was contributing to the very performance gap they were trying to close. Attention was being drawn towards improving the economics of an operation that had yet to establish reliable performance.
The realization changed the commitment. Martha and a colleague helped the leadership team focus on what the facility actually needed to accomplish: achieve a sustained level of production and sell what was produced over a defined and meaningful period.
It brought the real challenge into focus. The new operation first needed to establish a track record of production. Only then would it make sense to pursue the commercial opportunities and incremental optimization gains that had been commanding so much attention.
It sounds almost obvious after the fact.
But organizations under pressure accumulate activity very quickly. An existing initiative that makes sense at the enterprise level can find its way into parts of the business where it does not belong. Here, the irony was that the struggling operation was also potentially one of the company's biggest sources of future value. The prize from getting a multibillion-dollar asset to perform could dwarf the incremental gains being sought elsewhere. Yet the enterprise-wide focus was making it harder to give that fundamental performance challenge the attention it required.
For this leadership team, narrowing the commitment created room to focus.
This is central to JMW’s Shaping the Future approach: helping executive teams translate ambition into commitments with measurable evidence of progress. Martha is particularly interested in what happens when leaders translate that ambition into evidence they can immediately recognize in the business. What will be produced within a defined timeframe? What would need to be observably different for the organization to know it is on a new performance trajectory?
Making that connection between an intended future and observable impact is one of the areas Martha has been working to make more consistent across the offering.
Martha has seen the opposite happen too. When performance disappoints, leaders can become busy reorganizing the business or introducing new processes. The activity is visible, which can make it feel like progress. Yet the underlying issue may remain untouched.
Knowing what not to act on is part of leadership too.
Martha believes AI makes the quality of conversation between leaders more important, rather than less.
Much of the attention naturally goes to the technology and the productivity gains organizations hope to achieve from it. But as systems become more capable, Martha believes the quality of conversation between people becomes more important than ever.
She puts the question simply: “How do leaders facilitate the human interactions, the conversations with your leadership team that really move the needle?”
Digital systems can move information extremely efficiently. They cannot decide which uncomfortable subject an executive team needs to put on the table to produce a breakthrough.
That remains leadership work.
AI may even make avoiding it easier. More information can be exchanged through systems without people necessarily spending more time making sense of what it means together. The distinction between communicating information and having a consequential conversation will matter.
For Martha, that connects directly to the ideas of freedom and impact that have become important across her own career.
Freedom begins when leaders can see where their choices have narrowed without them noticing.
Impact requires enough clarity to know whether all that activity is actually changing anything.
After almost 15 years working with leaders, Martha has learned to pay close attention to the moment when somebody says, that's just how it is.
Because seeing what sits beneath that assumption can change what leaders believe is possible.
JMW works with executive teams to turn ambitious business goals into measurable performance. Explore Shaping the Future.
