The Art of Management

This episode is guest-hosted by two NotebookLM AI Chatbots. We fed them a few simple instructions, and then the first 30-plus pages of the book. Let us know if you like this and we’ll ask them to produce some more episodes.

What would happen if we send all of the managers away for a day…or more? This is one of the many counter-intuitive yet enlightening topics that are part of AgencyAgile’s leadership workshops, and also part of Jack’s new book, Unmanaged, Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations, launching November 1st on Amazon. The answer may surprise you, or at least make you laugh, especially if you are a manager. Jack is joined by Steve Prentice in this podcast short on managers, managing, and productivity.

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 that workers cannot work without being managed. These mistaken notions find their origins in the Industrial Revolution.  Though they were the best we could do then, they are woefully inadequate, and even counterproductive, today. This is especially true in agencies, consultancies, and other project-driven organizations. In this episode, Steve Prentice talks with Jack Skeels about the origins of management and key ideas featured in his new book, Unmanaged, Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations.

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 leave. Does that mean useful, effective meetings are a hopeless cause? Of course not! But the techniques you can use to make them work will surprise you – like telling people they can leave whenever they want. Jack Skeels and Steve Prentice will give you the tips and tricks in out TAOM Episode 11, I Hate Your Stupid Meeting, part of The Art Of Management Series, available here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 we are in a different place now, with better tools and some new attitudes, finding your way to better meetings is still a challenge. In this first of a two-part series, we’ll dive into what was truly wrong with the 20th century meeting model. Organizational performance expert Jack Skeels chats with author Steve Prentice about why meetings devolved into an event unto themselves, and somehow lost track of their original purpose. Check out Episode 10, entitled Your Meeting Sucks – part of The Art Of Management Series, available here, or anywhere you find great podcasts.

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.

Can a manager manage better by stepping back and letting teams manage themselves? As strange as this may sound, the answer is yes. Small teams 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, author and management specialist Steve Prentice interviews Jack and in 20 minutes they cover some surprising but highly effective new approaches that managers can take to maximize their teams’ productivity in the new normal.

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 managing can be better! 

Can you be a better manager by being a lazy manager?

At the core of our ridiculously successful AgencyAgile techniques is this very idea and ways to apply it.  Should you be involved with your teams, or merely available?  Should you be the expert, or would it be better to be at least a little ignorant? 

As with every TAOM podcast, we’ll surprise you with the research and our first-hand learnings into how to bring the best out in your teams by being the best style of manager.

Tune in to this week’s episode and learn more!

Questions that you’ll want to ponder after the episode:

1. Do you remember what it was like, the shift from specialist to manager?  If not in yourself, in others?  Can you see that the things that we want in an effective Lazy Manager are things that you or they may have lost?
2. Make a list of things you think you should do as a manager, but could instead be done by the someone or everyone else, to equal or greater effect.
3. Do you see how managers try to show that they are managing, that they can compete for being managerial, which also usually means lower productivity?

Peter Drucker is famous for pointing out how much better managers could manage if they only used numbers. His message: “…if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” 

Managing is the business of numbers…or is it? Certainly, Frederick Taylor, the inventor of Scientific Management felt that way. 

What neither of them told you is that just because you’re using a number, it doesn’t mean that you’re managing well. In fact, it may be quite the opposite.

A key behavior for managers is assessing the problems that surround moments like this episode’s stars, the numbers 6 and 8.  In this case, 6 was the number of hours that it was supposed to take to get something done, and 8 was the number that it actually took.  The simple solution employed by most managers and systems is to treat the 8 as the problem.

We’ll explore both the consequences of that behavior, and also dig deeply into what the 6 and 8 really tell us, touching briefly on concepts like anchoring bias, false precision and a key idea taken from Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System.

Questions that you’ll want to ponder after the episode:

1. Can you see the bias in estimates versus actuals and the way they are handled?
2. Can you see our sense of betrayal or disappointment, and how that can color your or other people’s responses? 
3. Can you see what happens when you introduce range-based estimates to a discussion?

In the 1950s, a distinction was made between the underlying beliefs about workers – Theory X and Theory Y.  Depending on which you believe, it would influence your behavior as a manager, causing you to either be more controlling or more empowering. 

Theory X was a representation of the assumptions or implications of Taylorism (listen to episode 3.1) – that workers, in general, refuse to work unless rewarded or punished.  Theory Y represented an opposing view, that workers actually embrace or welcome the opportunity to work.   

The argument was made that for processes that tend to be more repetitive, Theory X was probably more effective.  Likewise, for work where craft (or thinking) was needed, Theory Y would be more suitable. 

But that turns out to be untrue.  

In this episode I will provide a brief vignette in which you can hear the difference between the styles, and also share with you some of the very interesting history of this research, including the work done by Rensis Likert.

Likert was famous for his survey techniques and how he isolated a set of managerial attitudes and topics that are at the core of the Theory X and Y divide.

Key Insights and Your Homework:

1. Do you see and hear managers talking about employee’s and their attitudes towards work using the Theory X perspective, as if the worker is the problem, and all other factors are a constant?

1. Theory X posits that workers are inherently not motivated.  Who needs greater motivation to go into work each day, the Theory X manager, or the worker who works for a Theory X manager?