Management For Startups Podcast

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. - NYT's 7 Minute HIIT Workout

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.  Links: Hiten Shah's My Billion Dollar Mistake (where he talks about 'Hiten bombs') MFS: The Positional Power Barrier, and the podcast episode on the same topic. Notes on One-on-Ones.

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.  Sam Altman on retention.  The Startup Playbook.

I launched Keep Your People — The Startup Manager's Guide to Employee Retention last Friday, and the book is available on the MFS website here. In this episode of the MFS podcast, we cover a quick overview of KYP, 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. Facebook engineering leader Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth wrote about this in his post 'How Not To Disagree', and I want to talk about that today. How do you deal with this situation? What should you do if your subordinates don't like what your boss wants to happen?

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).

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. I read about Career Conversations with some surprise, as by that point, I'd been doing something very similar. 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.  I had to steel myself to fire him, and I mentioned all sorts of negative effects that would happen had I allowed him to stay.  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. 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.

The Manager's Job is the core of MFS's management philosophy. But I recently realised that The Manager's Job could be interpreted negatively — that is, be used to justify output at any costs.  This week we deal with the idea that it is ever worth it to increase output at any cost. 

This week's episode is about a heuristic we used at my old role. Basically: "if you can't train a given subordinate, let them go." This heuristic governed the way we thought about our probation program. I discuss the caveats and implications of this rule. 

Seymour Papert's life work was about how humans learnt. We look at his big idea — knowledge construction — and draw on it to learn how to become a better trainer, and therefore a better manager.  Andy Ko's summary of Papert's work may be found on Medium here. Papert's book, Mindstorms, is a summary of his life's work and philosophy, built around Knowledge Construction.  

The Fundamental Attribution Error is a cognitive bias from social psychology — one that affects our interactions with other people, and one that everyone is vulnerable to. This week, we talk about guarding ourselves against the FAE — which turns out to be the same as guarding oneself against premature judgment of other people. 

The positional power barrier is my name for the power differential between manager and subordinate. It affects nearly every interaction you'll have with your people, and it can be quite insidious, because it is nearly invisible. This week, we discuss what to do about it. 

What's the optimal number a manager should have? The most common answer to this question is 7±2. But why is this the case, and why is it important to know one's limits? This week, we explore some interesting facts about the optimal number, and what it means for your practice as manager.

This episode marks the end of the mini-series 'The Bare Minimum You Need to Know to Be An Adequate Manager'. We close with a summary of the techniques we've learnt over the past eight episodes, and talk about next steps. In a nutshell this is: always remember what The Manager's Job is, and use that as your metric for success. 

Hopefully you're convinced by now that doing one-on-ones is useful and potentially valuable to your management practice.  In this episode, we cover the 3 kinds of one-on-ones that you'll experience once you start doing them, and what to do for each of them. Most people are scared to start; talking about the 3 kinds makes one-on-ones less scarier because it reduces the fear of the unknown. Hopefully this makes it easier to give one-on-ones a shot. Credit where credit is due: I first discovered this idea over at Rand's blog.

In this episode, we cover the little details about actually doing one-on-ones. How do you determine the best frequency for your team? What goes into a typical one-on-one? What are some principles to remember as you start to do these meetings with your subordinates? 

One-on-ones get a lot of flak — both inside and outside the tech industry. What are they good for, and why even do them? I tell two stories that hopefully highlight what one-on-ones are good for, and why you should consider adding them as a technique to your management playbook. (This episode is part of the mini-series The Bare Minimum You Need To Know To Be an Adequate Manager).

Prioritisation will make the biggest difference to your ability to remain sane as a manager. The most important side effect of learning prioritisation is to gain the ability to say no to certain management tasks — while being fully aware of the consequences on your team. We talk about how to do this in this episode.

The Manager's Job is a lens through which one may understand all of management. In this episode, we discuss the downstream implications of this framework, and how it helps when thinking about the other management techniques we've talked about so far. This episode is part of the mini series 'The Bare Minimum You Need To Be An Adequate Manager'.

In the last episode, we talked about how training and delegation are two halves of the same process. In this episode, we explore how to do training in service of better delegation — the basics all the way to how to systematise your training program so you're not spending all your time training people.

We know delegation can be done badly — the English language has a word to describe bad delegation: micro-management. Why is it that new managers sometimes micro-manage, even when they know it's a bad idea? We explore why, and then discuss five techniques to delegate well.

Management for Startups is a podcast dedicated to the new manager on the startup treadmill. In this episode, we discuss the goal of the podcast, and talk about the focus for the next six to eight episodes: 'the bare minimum you need to know to be an adequate manager'. (Hint: it's only four techniques!)