Management Café: March 2023
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 March 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.
#48 Developing your leadership style
Many leadership journeys start with a natural career progression: we get promoted to manager and leadership is viewed as just another work task. Over time this evolves into a broader understanding. It's a challenging job. We will get tested in all sorts of ways. And it can be an opportunity to learn so much about ourselves, to grow as a person and build invaluable skills.
But we all have to start from somewhere. And the way we manage is heavily influenced, even constrained, by the culture and expectations of our organisation. When we change organisations we often have to adapt the way that we lead.
So in all this complexity how do we develop our own leadership style?
#49 Manager burnout
Is it just us, or does it feel like the last few years have been a particularly torrid time for managers? Managers have always been the interface between employees and their organisation. They act as a kind of translator between the two.
In recent years there have been extraordinary challenges in both directions of those relationships. And all this against a backdrop of pandemics, social polarisation, economic uncertainty, tight labour markets and of course the remote work / back to office / hybrid merry-go-around.
It's been a lot and managers have been caught in the middle time and again...
#50 Celebrating big and small
We tend to miss the smaller moments of achievement. Our focus is often on big organisational or team goals, huge milestones where we come together to celebrate (like the 50th episode of Management Cafe!). But in today's coffee catchup we are talking about more personal achievements.
The sort of things which seem less consequential on the surface but can have an outsize impact on our performance. "Small-c celebrations" can tap into our deepest personal motivations as a manager, highlighting the behaviours which matter most, sustaining us during hard times and protecting us against burnout.
#51 Manager as umbrella: Protecting the team from the storm
The notion of a manager as a protector of the team is deeply embedded. After all, a primary part of any manager's job is to remove roadblocks and distractions so their team can stay focussed on their objectives.
But it's not always easy to decide what will distract the team versus what might be helpful to them. Should the team know when a storm is forecast? When a storm is happening? And how much context do they need about the storm itself?
Pilar and Tim explore some of their experiences with sharing or withholding information.