When you're moving to a new role — be it as an individual contributor to a manager, or a manager to another part of the organisation — your move is often fraught with uncertainty.  This week, we talk about a method for increasing the odds of your success: seek out the people who have failed in similar situations, and ask for their stories. 

Why is it that certain people can't seem to get better at management? Why are there so many bad managers out there?  A year or so ago, I came across the first plausible explanation for this observation, from Ben Horowitz, a VC with Andreesen Horowitz.  We take a look at why this framework seems plausible, and how to use it when it comes to evaluating management skills — be it yours or others. 

In our last episode, we talked about transitioning from a physical workplace to a remote work configuration. This week's episode is about taking care of yourself before you take on the responsibility of taking care of others. This applies to managers who have to do one-on-ones, but it's also more generic. I keep thinking to the analogy of 'putting on your own oxygen masks' before you help the person next to you. We cover things to do to help reduce the mental weight of this trying period.

Many of us are stuck working from home this week, as the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps across the globe.  This week's episode is about managing your team from this position — especially if you're not used to working remotely. What should you do? What should you watch out for? We talk about three things to handle this transition.

Idea bombs, or founder bombs is the tendency for you to tell your subordinates about this great big idea you have, and then distract them from execution. In this episode, we explore three methods for resisting this nearly universal urge. 

In my previous episode about my new book, Keep Your People, I mentioned that 'mission is an overrated tool for employee retention'. This was a throwaway comment that I realise should properly be explained. This episode, I spend some time unpacking the assumptions and arguments in that single sentence. 

I launched Keep Your People — The Startup Manager's Guide to Employee Retention last Friday, and the book is available on the MFS website. In this episode of the MFS podcast, we cover a quick overview of the contents of the book, as well as my apology for not updating the site and the podcast for so many months. 

Giving good instructions is difficult! This week, we look at 'executive intent', an adaptation of 'Commander's Intent', a technique that was developed by the US Army for better, clearer instructions.  The two books referenced during the episode: - Sources of Power - Power of Intuition

We spend a great deal of time as managers forming accurate models of the people we work with. It's important to resist the urge to stick to the first narrative we generate.  This episode, we explore how to resist the narrative fallacy, and why it's important to do so.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos popularised the idea of 'disagree and commit' in his 2016 shareholder's letter. It's a fascinating idea, but it isn't the most common form of 'disagree and commit' that you'd experience as a middle manager.  No, the most common scenario is one where you don't agree with your boss, but you're forced to execute his directives anyway. How do you deal with this situation? What should you do if your subordinates don't like what your boss wants to happen? This week, we find out.

We all have down days. When you're an individual contributor, this isn't so bad. But when you're a manager, your entire team depends on you. How do you deal with motivational issues when you're hit with an inevitable down day? 

This week we deal with the challenge many makers — programmers, designers, hardware engineers — face when they make the leap to management. How do you wake up in the morning to go to work when you no longer get joy from what you do?  (Inspired from this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19485559).

If you're a middle manager, dealing with your boss is going to be one of the main things that you'll have to learn to do. This week, we'll talk about a fundamental technique that every manager would eventually need to learn: the ability to really understand your boss's true motivations.

One of the implications of the manager's job of 'increasing the output of the team' is to serve as the 'shit shield' for said team. This means protecting them from the natural randomness of events in your organisation, especially when it doesn't affect them directly.  But how much to keep from them, and how much to let them know? What rule should we pick, and stick to? This week, we talk a little about how much protection is too much.

In Kim Scott's 2017 management book Radical Candor, Scott describes a management technique that she attributes to ex-Google manager Russ Laraway, who had to integrate the Doubleclick team post Google acquisition. The technique is called Career Conversations, and Scott and Laraway both propose that it could lead to better employee retention. This podcast describes my experiences using Laraway's Career Conversations in Vietnam.

We've talked about delegation before on the MFS podcast, but one thing that I've neglected to mention is that it's important to 'explain why' when delegating to subordinates. Explaining 'why' — sometimes called providing context, or communicating executive intent — is important if you want your subordinates to make decisions on your behalf.  This podcast is about how to do it, and how to get context for yourself when you're dealing with a boss who doesn't communicate executive intent.

Process change is something that is inevitable at every startup. This week we look at a general template for introducing process change, and two ways of evaluating an impending change you're considering. 

Last week we discussed the dangers of firing too slowly. This week we'll discuss the dangers of the opposite view: that of firing too quickly. In my experience, startup managers who fire too quickly tend to have 'high standards', and they tend to come from performance-oriented organisations. The nature of doing a startup though, work against some of their instincts.  We explore exactly how these differences occur, and what to do about them. 

We've discussed the difficulty of firing bad performers in the past — in the last episode on the Manager Ugh Field, for instance, I illustrated the ugh field with a personal story on the difficulty of firing an underperforming subordinate.  In this episode, we will focus directly on this question: what happens when you allow an underperforming subordinate stay on in your company? Why is this a bad idea? 

The Manager Ugh Field is what you feel when you're facing a difficult situation at work. Your brain throws up a deflector shield to force your attention away from a difficult action, conversation or confrontation at work. Knowing how to deal with the ugh field is what separates the good managers from the bad. This week, we discuss how to deal with the 'ugh' field — and how to turn it from a weakness to a strength.