Can you be a better manager by stepping back and letting teams manage themselves? As strange as this may sound, the answer is yes. Often managers stop all over the landscape like monsters in a 1950’s B-movie. Small teams actually work better when there is less management over them, and this has as much to do with the way ordinary people interact as it does in how managers misalign their abilities with what they expect their job to be. In this episode of The Art of Management podcast Jack Skeels chats with author Steve Prentice and together they cover some surprising but highly effective new approaches that managers can take to maximize their teams’ productivity.
Lazy gets a bad rap. Managing and managers can be costly to your organization’s productivity (listen to episode 2.1, The Natural Tax of Managing) and in fact less
The answer is a pretty-much unqualified “yes.” Does it need to be that way? Of course not, but it is not easy. Meetings were horrible prior to 2020, and though
Many meetings are like unpleasant dinner guests who have come uninvited. They intrude on your productive time, drone on with unnecessary conversation, and you can’t wait for them to
You know less about managing than you think. These misperceptions and fallacies include theidea that managing creates productivity, that managers can solve everything, that more managing equals better managing, and
If we are going to redesign organizations for an AI era, we need to be clear about one thing up front: Tools have almost always pulled people apart.
In organizatiomns,
As organizations rush into AI adoption, most of the attention is on productivity gains. Less visible—and far more consequential—is the erosion of the one capability that will actually
Every few months someone else does a "Sam Altman" and announces that AI will make agencies obsolete. The case always sounds the same. AI can research faster. AI
Software Agile’s Manifesto famously dismissed the need for intermediaries, espousing “Individuals and Interactions” and “Client Communication.” over the use of managers, contracts and tools. So I’ve always been
