Management Café: May 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. We now have coffee every other week.
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.
#53 The problem with motivating others
As a manager our success is really dependent on the success of our teams. Yet there is something a bit topsy-turvy about the idea that managers are responsible for the motivation of our people. Much of motivation is intrinsic, most people inherently want to do good work.
In fact often times work, even the work of the manager, can get in the way of people's natural motivation. If the manager's responsibility is to remove obstacles for the team... are there times when we should remove ourselves?
#54 Why we love “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott (and why implementing it is so hard!)
We reference this book all the time. In today's conversation we learn why Radical Candor resonates so much with us and how we've used it in our own work. The core principles of the book shouldn't really feel radical, it should be commonplace to care about the people we work with and tell them our honest thoughts and feelings. And yet for many of us this is hard to do.
Radical Candor challenges us to be vulnerable with our emotions and more adaptable in our communication. This can be particularly uncomfortable for managers. We don't like to hurt or upset people, especially those we care about. But our job can require us to give critical feedback. Or even firing people. Many managers can be tempted down the "it's just business" path to protect themselves by maintaining strong boundaries and hiding their true feelings.
One of the wonderful gifts of this book is that it gives managers license to care. And we applaud that in the Management Café.
#55 The risk of Remote worker Disengagement
For this episode we used a different format. Pilar and Tim spotted a question in a community they’re members of, and with the permission of the poster, we’ve chosen to discuss it over coffee. This was the question:
“Remote workers are faking enthusiasm.
As a manager, I struggle to assess the motivation and engagement of my remote workers.
Employees are very good are presenting a positive image during check-ins.This makes it very hard to identify issues and provide targeted interventions to improve productivity and job satisfaction. This makes me hesitant to allow working from home.
I know that enthusiasm does not equal productivity. But I see lack of enthusiasm or faking enthusiasm as an early warning sign of quiet quitting. Do you have any advice?“
