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 yo

#34 The Two Things You Need To Be A Good Manager

Apr 15th, 2020 14m 54s

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 Ho

#33 Taking Care Of Yourself Before Taking Care of Others

Apr 3rd, 2020 14m 50s

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 ma

#32 Managing From Home

Mar 20th, 2020 14m 41s

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? Wha

#31 Beware Idea Bombs

Dec 11th, 2019 14m 49s

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

#30 Mission is Overrated?

Nov 27th, 2019 13m 40s

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 unpack

#29 An Overview of Keep Your People

Oct 23rd, 2019 14m 44s

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

#28 Executive Intent: Let Them Read Your Mind

Jun 6th, 2019 13m 32s

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

#27 People Judgment: Beware the Simple Narrative

May 22nd, 2019 13m 45s

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

#26 The Hard Thing About Disagree and Commit

Apr 24th, 2019 11m 48s

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 c

#25 Finding Motivation as an Old Manager

Apr 12th, 2019 14m 47s

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?

#24 Finding Motivation as a New Manager

Apr 4th, 2019 14m 54s

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

#23 Understanding Your Boss's True Motivations

Mar 27th, 2019 14m 55s

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 real

#22 Being the shit shield for your team

Mar 20th, 2019 15m 29s

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'

#21 Discovering Career Conversations By Accident

Feb 28th, 2019 14m 57s

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

#20 When Delegating, Explain Why

Feb 21st, 2019 13m 20s

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 communicati

#19 How to Introduce a Process Change

Jan 23rd, 2019 14m 50s

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.

#18 Firing Too Quickly

Jan 16th, 2019 14m 58s

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

#17 Firing Too Slowly

Jan 10th, 2019 14m 47s

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 h

#16 The Manager Ugh Field

Jan 2nd, 2019 14m 41s

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 u

#15 The Manager's Job Revisited

Dec 26th, 2018 14m 42s

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 wor

#14 The Training Heuristic for Firing

Dec 19th, 2018 14m 29s

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

#13 What Seymour Papert has to Teach Us about Training

Dec 12th, 2018 13m 58s

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

#12 The Fundamental Attribution Error

Dec 5th, 2018 13m 45s

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 turn

#11 The Positional Power Barrier

Nov 28th, 2018 13m 47s

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 d