Management For Startups Podcast

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).