The Manager Lab

Research shows that when people turn to AI instead of colleagues, team trust and coordination slowly erode — a process the authors call "relation slipping." Teams where members still ask teammates first report far stronger trust and coordination than those who default to AI.

The episode explains the causes and costs of relation slipping and gives five practical fixes you can use this week: make thinking visible, use AI to prepare (not replace) conversations, normalize asking coworkers, set team norms and incentives, and measure who people turn to. Try asking your team one question at the next meeting: when you got stuck this week, did you go to a person or to AI?

This episode explores the second dysfunction from Patrick Lencioni—fear of conflict—and why avoiding debate leads to artificial harmony, boring meetings, and poor decisions. Host Greg Gillum clarifies the difference between productive ideological conflict and destructive personal attacks, and why tension is necessary to surface the best ideas.

Practical tools include mining for buried disagreements, giving real-time permission to debate, assigning a rotating "miner," calling out silence, setting conflict norms, and resisting the urge to rescue. Trust is the foundation: without it, conflict feels like attack; with it, conflict is a search for the best answer.

Greg Gillum breaks down Rebecca Newton's HBR piece arguing that a silent leadership team is often more dangerous than a quarrelsome one, and that CEOs must design conditions for productive conflict.

The episode outlines four core moves—shared purpose, question-led meetings, interpersonal trust, and direct tension handling—and offers five practical actions you can take this week to encourage healthy pushback and better decisions.

Episode two explores the foundation of effective teams: vulnerability-based trust. Greg Gilliam breaks down Patrick Lencioni’s idea that true trust means teammates feel safe admitting mistakes, asking for help, and being honest.

Practical steps include leaders going first, running personal history exercises, using behavioral profiles to reduce judgment, rewarding admissions of uncertainty, and protecting those who speak up. Without this trust, teams waste energy on image management and avoid real debate.

Listen for concrete tips you can use in your next meeting and a preview of the next episode on the dangers of missing conflict.

New research shows that how leaders talk about AI — clarity, growth framing, and clear expectations — strongly predicts whether employees actually use AI tools and whether companies hit financial goals. Fear-based messages don’t increase adoption, and unclear communication harms results.

Managers should make AI an explicit part of the job, tell a growth-focused story about how it improves work, answer three clarity questions (strategy, priorities, how-to), and align signals like budgets and behaviors with their message.

When teams are overloaded, managers often become the bottleneck by absorbing work or pushing staff harder. This episode summarizes Melody Wilding’s Harvard Business Review advice and tells the story of a leader who burned out doing others’ work.

It offers five practical moves: have the team decide what to pause, make decision rules visible, hand off authority (not just tasks), tie new work to people’s goals, and be honest about priorities and strain, plus a simple one-week homework plan to get time back and grow your team.

In this episode Greg Gillum introduces Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team using a business fable about a tech company whose talented leaders can’t work together. The core idea: teamwork is a behavior problem, not a talent problem, and it can be fixed.

Greg explains the five-layer pyramid—trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results—and gives practical steps for managers: diagnose the lowest broken layer, coach behaviors, run a quick team self-check, and start the work of modeling healthier team habits. Next episode focuses on the foundation: trust.

This episode challenges the idea that eagerness equals readiness and argues that hesitation can be a sign of maturity, not a red flag.

It explains why people hesitate, how to diagnose the reasons, and gives five practical actions managers can take: audit for loudness bias, change the question, make the job concrete, match development to the type of hesitation, and decide instead of persuading.

Host Greg Gillum explores Michelle Geelan’s new book Resilient Optimism and explains how optimism is a behavior, not a feeling. The episode breaks down five practical manager moves—recalibrate mindset, transform stress, triage commitments, recharge smarter, and connect the dots—to help teams stay engaged amid change and uncertainty.

Try one behavior this week, model it for your team, and watch small actions build momentum and trust. This episode gives clear, actionable steps managers can use Monday morning to improve team climate and resilience.

This episode explains how to handle a team member who underperforms but is protected by relationships, legacy, or embedded knowledge — creating an accountability gap where you own outcomes but not the leverage to change them.

It offers five practical moves: diagnose the type of protection, test your boss with a small concrete ask, redistribute control through structure, decide what you will carry (and document it), and hold the line so standards apply to everyone.