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?