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.
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
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
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
One of the most insidious challenges for small and medium sized agencies is what is known as the "Founders Trap" where are the talented founder inadvertently builds an organization that struggles with growth.
"Only 5% of my agency?" That's the part of what you do that AI can't replace. There's another 20% it's fighting you for, and if you know how to win that fight, you can build a whole business on that top quarter. It just looks different from the agency you run now.
AI doesn't just collapse the production layer of consulting. It counterfeits the surface of expert judgment — well enough that the buyer can't tell at the moment of decision. This is why retreating into judgment won't save you.
