Management Café: January 2023 Episodes

Looking for a podcast about leadership and management to accompany you during your coffee break? Join Pilar Orti and Tim Burgess for 20 minutes (more or less) of informal chat about leading teams.

From this page you can listen to our Management Café January episodes - but we recommend you subscribe to the show on your favourite podcast app, or subscribe to the Management Café blog, where we post the show notes, sometimes with illustrations.

We’d love to hear what you think of the show, so feel free to drop us a note with your comments, or suggestions for new episodes.


#39 FOOd, a manager’s best friend

From the hidden power of the humble custard cream to the value of fancy restaurants, Pilar and Tim explore the role that food can play in our leadership practice. This is not discussed in business school curriculums, but something changes when we make the conscious step to stop our work activities so we can share food together. Eating together can be a powerful way to change the atmosphere of a workplace.

#40 Is the most important role of a manager to "give the quiet ones a voice"?

This concept comes from Kate Murphy’s excellent book “You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters“. For many of us silence can be challenging, it is often considered a sign that something is wrong. What happens when we approach the quiet ones with curiosity?

#41 Running a business with someone else

Pilar and Tim explore their experiences of being co-founders or co-managers, as well as being solely in charge. The co-founder dynamic is inevitably going to experience some challenges as a business has its ups and downs. The way that founders communicate, collaborate, challenge and complement each other has a huge impact on the culture of the company and it's success. This coffee is, yet again, something like a joint therapy session... prepare for a lot of talk about communication, values and alignment!

#42 War time leader or Peace time leader

In today’s coffee Pilar and Tim discuss the concept of Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO introduced by Ben Horowitz in 2011. Our companies and teams will all face difficult times where there is an existential threat or huge change looming. How do we lead through these challenges? Do we need a different leadership style to match the situation and what is the impact “wartime leadership”?

#43 Working with people who challenge us

We often need to experience some challenge in order to grow. But tension can easily spill over into destructive interactions. As leaders we need to demonstrate that we can challenge and be challenged. In this chat Pilar and Tim learn they have quite different thresholds for conflict. And they explore the difference between being challenged constructively vs destructively.

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