One manager I’ve seen recently uses the all too familiar tell or authoritarian style with her team. She knows it all; what is wrong, who is at fault and exactly what they must do to fix it. She even knows what others think! In a meeting from which one of her people was absent, she [...]

I was reminded again this week of the many ways organisations can be incompetent.
I had been asked to help a manager whose staff were argumentative, surly and uncooperative. ‘There’s nothing I can do with them,’ he said. ‘They just don’t want to work!’ On the surface it looked as if this manager had indeed inherited [...]

I am still receiving replies to my invitation for people to tell me about conversations that they find scary.
Here is a sample of the suggestions I have received.
At work many of the conversations involve speaking up about decisions you feel are unfair, or about someone’s less than tolerable management style, even when you have been [...]

I was listening to a client this morning as she described how she planned to manage her new team. She has a number of relatively new managers, people with great technical skill but, typically, little management expertise. As best as I can remember, she put it like this.
“They avoid conversations. They let small things slide [...]