Empowering your team and giving them autonomy is good. It increases motivation and engagement, and will improve performance especially when the context is complex and volatile. But not all employees respond well to having autonomy. And for managers the feeling of not being 'in control' lurks in the background. Our Punks share their thoughts on how to navigate these tensions in this 15 minute blast.

Some people reportedly spend more than 80% of their work in meetings, 90% of which they consider pointless. If you are one of them, how do you cope with that? Have you found the key to avoiding those meetings? Or have you managed to introduce ways to make those meetings productive and exciting? 

In this episode, our Punks share their views and suggestions on how to put your foot down and become more discerning in which meetings you grace with your presence. And provide some tips on how to spice things up a little. 

You excel at your job but you get overlooked for promotion, while those colleagues who are willing to 'play the game' pass you by on the career ladder. 

Sounds familiar? What can you do about it? 

Do you have to sell your soul, or are there other ways to overcome this injustice? Don't management see that they are promoting less competent people and are wasting great potential? 
Or is there another explanation? 

Our punks address these sticky questions and provide their usual spin on it.

Have you experienced this conundrum too? Or perhaps you have better advice? Do get in touch and let us know!

Most companies above a certain size have some sort of standardised appraisal process, often to be carried out on an annual basis. It involves a template (or app) containing many questions to be answered, ratings to be handed out, percentages-completed to be filled in, you know the drill. And we all dread it, both managers and employees alike. So why do it? Just to get it over with? Or should we fight it, to get it changed into something useful? Listen to this episode on what our Punks think of it.  

How do you deal with team members who have been trusted to deliver but are not performing to the required standard? 

That is the question our Punks are debating on this episode. Should you abandon your empowering management style and come down on them like the proverbial ton of bricks? Or could there be good reasons why your staff are underperforming? We give you our usual orginal and irreverent perspectives, drawing upon our own experiences as managers, consultants and coaches.

Colin Newlyn (Decrapify Work), Ben Simpson (VitalOrg) and Paul Jansen (Trust Works) have turned into Agony Uncles, and give their irreverent, refreshing and original views on how to deal with challenges at work.
Today's episode: "The members on my team are lining up to have me make all decisions. It is driving me mad. How can I encourage them to take more decisions themselves?"

Colin Newlyn (Decrapify Work), Ben Simpson (VitalOrg) and Paul Jansen (Trust Works) have turned into Agony Uncles, and give their irreverent, refreshing and original views on how to deal with challenges at work.
This episode: How can I quickly build trust with my new team member?

Check out our latest episode of Work Punks, in which your trusted Punks have turned into Agony Uncles. We are responding to a query that begins "Help, I'm butting heads with my finance manager!" with our usual mix of irreverence, spikiness and wisdom, drawing upon our personal experience (boy, have we been there!) and knowledge.

 Our guest for this episode is Natasha Bye, also known as the Strategy Doctor, who has made a name for herself by bringing comedy into the boardroom. So what is the link between strategy and comedy? Do you get better conversations by wrapping it into a joke? How many people does it take to fix a lightbulb in your organisation? This and more will be topic of conversation in this month's Work Punks episode.

Some useful references:
- On Natasha Bye: https://strategydoctor.co.uk/
- "The future doesn't just happen; the future results from the conversations we have today" - We think this is Ralph Stacey. But we can't find it anywhere. Please help us locate the source.

Our Punks try to get behind the root causes of why working practices seem to be broken in so many companies. Is short-termism behind it all, and if so, what is causing this behaviour in the first place? Are there examples that buck that trend and what can we learn from them? Join us for this episode and share your experiences of broken or trend-bucking organisations in the comments. As always, here are some links for further contemplation:
- Bill Anderson - the former CEO of Roche Pharmaceuticals and currently heading the working revoluation at Bayer - on how to reduce bureaucracy: https://www.garyhamel.com/video/busti...
- Clay Christensen’s view on the impact of financialisation on innovation: https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveden...