The Manager Lab

In this episode of Manager Lab, Greg Gillum explains why clarifying your personal core values improves decision-making, builds trust, and guides leaders through complex trade-offs.

Learn a four-step process—reflect on pivotal stories, distill recurring themes, test your values, and make them visible—and five practical actions you can try this week: journal, run a values mirror meeting, frame trade-offs, anchor performance conversations, and run values retrospectives.

Lead with clarity and act with intention: use your values as a compass to make consistent, credible choices that compound trust over time.

In this episode of Manager Lab we explore Katie Best's Harvard Business Review article on self-coaching and walk through the SOLVE framework to lead yourself through high‑stakes problems when an executive coach isn't available.

Learn the five steps—State the problem, Open the box, Lay out the solution, Venture forth, and Elevate your learning—and how to apply them to diagnose root causes, design practical plans, act carefully, and reflect to strengthen your leadership over time.

In this episode of Manager Lab, we explore Rebecca Knight's HBR article "When Managing Your Team Becomes Too Much" and outline five practical strategies to reclaim time and refocus on strategic leadership. Learn how to segment your team, align work upfront, turn meetings into problem-solving sessions, empower your people, and have candid conversations about capacity.

Discover actionable tips—like subgrouping direct reports, creating one-page briefs, setting rescue thresholds, and redesigning meeting agendas—that you can apply immediately to reduce overload and scale your leadership effectively.

Music. Welcome to the Manager Lab. This episode explores how loneliness is reshaping workplaces, driven by hybrid work, technology, and broader social shifts, and how that erosion of trust and belonging harms innovation, engagement, and retention.

It highlights surprising insights—connection is part of the work, weak ties matter, and vulnerability builds trust—and offers practical strategies: build rituals and shared identity, design space for authentic connection, role-model vulnerability, create opportunities for weak ties, measure loneliness, and embed connection into hybrid policies.

Leaders and employees can start small—one ritual, one personal check-in—to strengthen connection, resilience, and creativity in their teams.

In this episode of Manager Lab, host Greg Gillum breaks down decision-making and delegation using Cheryl Strauss Einhorn’s HBR framework: "Should You Delegate That Decision? Ask These Four Questions."

Learn the four questions to determine when to delegate—who’s closest to the action, whether a decision can be routinized, whose perspective will improve the outcome, and where momentum is stalled—plus a real-world example involving minor design approvals.

Greg shares practical tools (decision audits, decision matrices, clear decision rights), common pitfalls to avoid, and a simple weekly challenge to help you start delegating effectively and grow leadership across your team.

Music. Welcome to the Manager Lab, where we delve into the increasingly dynamic world of talent management. In this episode Greg Gillum breaks down the HBR article "The Secret to Building a High‑Performing Team," highlighting two foundational capabilities—open, structured communication and the courage to speak up and take risks—that drive trust, innovation, and lasting performance. Learn the culture map (connection vs. courage), see where your team sits, and get practical steps: lead with vulnerability, invite honest conversations, set three commitments, and move toward the "Last 8%" culture of high care and high accountability.

In this episode of Manager Lab, Greg Gillum breaks down Paul Ingram’s HBR article "Who Are You as a Leader?" and introduces the identity map — a simple visual tool to list, connect, and curate the roles and traits that shape your leadership.

Learn practical steps to build your identity map, choose situational leadership selves, and use context-aware leadership to boost authenticity, trust, and performance. Try the quick exercise: sketch your map, highlight one identity in your next meeting, and reflect on the results.

Greg Gillum breaks down why managers struggle to delegate and how to make delegation work, drawing on Elsbeth Johnson’s HBR insights.

Discover the four hidden barriers—task-driven dopamine, difficulty saying no, unclear expectations, and confusing doing with leading—and simple fixes: create routines, reframe delegation, clarify outcomes, practice small handoffs, and schedule reflection.

Walk away with practical steps to free your time for strategic work and help your team grow.

In this episode Greg Gillum breaks down a new HBR study showing that foundational "soft" skills—like communication, adaptability, teamwork and basic numeracy—form the backbone of long-term career success. The researchers map a nested skill structure and find that roughly 80% of the wage benefits from advanced skills depend on these core capabilities.

The episode explains skill entrapment and its role in persistent inequities, and gives five practical steps you can use today: audit your foundational skills, practice nested learning, integrate soft skills into daily routines, mentor early-career colleagues, and advocate for systemic training that prioritizes fundamentals.

In this episode of the Manager Lab, Greg Gillum explores Harvard Business Review author Peter T. Coleman’s concept of Conflict Intelligence (CIQ) — an emotional-intelligence-plus framework that combines self-awareness, social conflict skills, adaptivity, and systemic wisdom to turn workplace friction into clarity and innovation.

Listeners learn why conflict matters, how leaders can embed CIQ across teams, and three practical steps to start cultivating conflict intelligence today: reflect on triggers, invite safe tension, and use quick pulse tools to surface microtensions.