Management Café
by Virtual not Distant
Season 4: Join co-hosts Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti as they chat about what they've learned through their time leading teams. Season 3: Oh No, My Team's Gone Remote! Seasons 1 and 2: Improve your management and leadership practice over a cup of coffee and get a book recommendation too. The role of the manager is evolving as technology helps us to self-organise and take more control of how and where we work from. In this podcast, Pilar Orti from Virtual not Distant, dissects modern management practice, not just for official managers, but for team members who want to make things happen too.
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Episodes
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MC93 Knowing When to Move On - our final episode
Yes, this is Tim and Pilar's last episode, so we talk about moving on and the importance of wrapping things up. Interview with Andy Gotts photographer that Pilar mentions: https://youtu.be/G0CF6FKR1qk?si=xLp_OSTjvcAlXULj Find out more about Pilar and Bree's book on loneliness in remote teams:...
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MC92 Manager Mindset: Perfectionism
In this episode, hosts Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti talk about the dangers of being a perfectionist when managing a team, and why it's different to being a perfectionist individual contributor. (And you'll hear for yourself how neither Tim nor Pilar are perfectionists...)
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MC91 Manager Mindset: Loyalty
Hosts Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti have a good chat about the nature of loyalty, who we should be loyal to at work and what happens when we get the balance wrong.
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A quick thank you and we'll be back next year!
Have an excellent start to 2025 - from Tim and Pilar. www.managementcafepodcast.com
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MC90 Manager Mindset: Pessimism
Who knew that talking about pessimism could be so much fun... even if most of the laughter is self-deprecating. In today's episode, hosts Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti talk about what happens when we let our "inner pessimist" come through. For more information, visit www.managementcafepodcast.com
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MC89 Manager Mindset: Comparison
The new series on Manager Mindsets starts with a discussion of comparison. Comparison is unavoidable, especially in the age of social media. It can feed difficult and unpleasant emotions like doubt, jealousy and imposter syndrome. Indeed, someone once said "Comparison is the thief of joy". And if...
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MC88 Feedback, Mindset vs Cognitive Tendencies and Long-Covid Awareness
As co-hosts Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti wrap up the Manager Emotions series, they explain why they're moving onto mindset, and how this is different from cognitivie tendencies (and why they might well be mixing the two up!). Plus, some feedback on our episode on Emotional Contagion, and Pilar…
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MC87 Manager Emotions: Confusion
Our hosts Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti talk about the many times they've been confused, the difficulties in feeling the emotion as individual and manager, and what happens when a team member becomes confused.
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MC86 Manager Emotions: Compassion
For the sixth episode of our series on manager emotions, Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti talk about Compassion. Good leaders don't just remove obstacles and show their people the way forward. People also need to know that their leaders will support them in the hard times. And importantly, they need...
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MC85 Manager Emotions: Pride
Welcome to the fifth episode of our series on manager emotions, where hosts Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti talk about Pride. We want to see good work, both in ourselves as managers and also in the teams that we lead. Pride creates a virtuous cycle that rewards and encourages healthy achievement. Do a...
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MC84 Emotional Contagion (part of the Manager Emotions season)
For the fourth episode of our series on manager emotions we talk about Emotional Contagion, as it's something that keeps coming up. Emotional Contagion describes how one person's emotions can induce similar emotions in others. This is often happening at an unconscious level, for example, we mimic...
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We've got some feedback! On anger and emotions.
Many thanks to Catherine Nicholson from Virtual Training Team for sharing her thoughts on emotions at work and anger, after listening to the first episode of the manager emotions series. We share her comments directly from her LinkedIn posts, and expand on them....
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MC83 Manager Emotions: Hopelessness
We continue with our Manager Emotions series. So much of our work culture is about productivity. Traits like productivity, positivity, drive and a strong work ethic are idolised. We are often expected to overcome obstacles through pure hard work or "grit". This doesn't leave much space for...
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MC82 Manager Emotions: Joy
We continue with our Manager Emotions series. Today's episode is all about joy. We remind ourselves of what it feels like, but we also wonder whether it's always ok to express it. Join Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti for coffee - or tea! In our last coffee we talked about how anger can signal that...
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MC81 Manager Emotions: Anger
This marks the first of our series on manager emotions, where we discuss some of feelings we experience at work. Anger is one of the more complex emotions for a manager to navigate. Anger is about a perceived wrong and our desire to find a resolution. On the one hand, anger can be energising and...
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MC80 Why Do We Procrastinate? (or what is procrastination, anyway?)
Join our hosts Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti. Most of us are familiar with avoiding a task that we should be doing. But is there more to it? On the one hand we worry that procrastination leads us to being totally unproductive. But is being hyper-efficient realistic? Don't we sometimes need to break...
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MC79 Context is Everything!
A theme we keep coming back to in the Management Café is the importance of context. In each situation there are many variables that influence what happens. For example the company culture, our manager, our team, the particular task and our own capability. Sometimes we have to accept that the...
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MC78 Helping Employees Avoid Burnout from Challenging Tasks
Step into the Management Café with your hosts Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti. This conversation was inspired by an article Pilar read in Organizational Dynamics: "How managers can help employees navigate tough decisions without burning out by Andrew Molinsky and Laura Noval. They describe a specific...
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We'd love your input into our new series on Manager Emotions
A short bonus episode to let you know what's brewing in the Management Café. In about a month, we'll be starting a new series, on manager emotions. In each episode, we'll dive into a specific emotion, discussing what it feels like, its purpose, and how it can help or hinder us as managers. Our...
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MC77 Evaluating Potential in the People We Manage
Our hosts in the Management Café believe that everyone has the potential to be better at something. And for them, as for many of us, helping someone grow is one of the most rewarding aspects of being a manager. Similarly for employees it's a wonderful feeling to have a manager who believes in us,...
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MC76 Manager regrets: how situations changed us and what it means to us now.
Several times recently in the Management Café our hosts have talked about regrets. Those formative management experiences where they look back and wish they had acted differently. Making mistakes is part of our learning journey but some situations weigh on us more than others. Revisiting them can...
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MC75 Why Does Management Have a Bad Name?
Get in touch through our Contact Form https://managementcafepodcast.com/contact/ Let's face it, management has a mixed reputation. It seems like everyone has a story to tell about their manager doing something poorly. But when we break it down, often times it's that we've had a bad experience…
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MC74 Article Analysis: Learning in the Flow of Work
Tim and Pilar discuss an article featured in the Jan/Feb 2024 edition of the Harvard Business Review: "Leading in the Flow of Work" by Hitendra Wadhwa, Founder of the Mentora Institute. Hitendra posits that "rather than (being) a trait to be acquired, leadership is a state to be activated"…
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MC73 GenAI: Friend or Foe?
In 2024 Generative AI is still an a rapidly emerging technology. We know it's going to impact lots of jobs and work behaviour. But it's not yet apparent how that impact will be felt. There is a big difference between ChatGPT helping you with a task (e.g. summarising your notes or drafting a...
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MC72 The Emoji Manager
Following on from coffee #71 about the impact of technology on our leadership practice, Pilar and Tim talk about emoji as a communications tool for managers. Tiny and ubiquitous, it's easy to underestimate their importance. But when used skilfully, emoji give us a visual language that can provide...
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MC71 The influence of technology on management practices
We hear a lot about tech. Tech disrupts businesses and creates unicorns. Tech changes workplaces and creates new ways to interact. But what about the impact of technology on our management practices? Our hosts talk about the difficulties that come if we allow technology to dictate how we manage....
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MC70 Self-Leadership is the Foundation of Management with special guest Morgan Legge
The wonderful Morgan Legge, founder of Pivot Your Work and Head of Organizational Change at Convert.com, joins the Management Cafe! Morgan, Pilar and Tim met through online communities and podcasting, a great example of what we discussed in #65 "Building a network outside your organisation". You...
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MC69 Transparency in management: Balancing openness and discretion
Managers sit at the crux of organisational transparency and discretion. They need their employees and organisations to share information with them and are regularly deciding what to pass on and what to keep confidential. It's a tough balance. People need the right information to feel secure and…
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MC68 Generational differences in the workplace
This week our hosts (both Gen X) dig into the differences between different generations of workers. There have been endless articles and presentations on topics like "How to work with Millennials". But for Pilar and Tim there are inherent dangers in assigning behaviours to an entire group of…
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MC67 The Dynamics of Group Conversations
Pilar and Tim are back having a conversation about conversations. Following on from #66 which covered 1:1 conversations, in this episode they dive into group discussions. Facilitating a group adds another layer of complexity - for example giving more time to one person means less time for…
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MC66 Managing the dynamics of individual conversations
Pilar and Tim have a meta conversation about conversations. Participating in a good conversation means we listen, we get to talk, we feel heard, we deepen our understanding of a topic and we build connection with the other person. However not all conversations are created equal. Sometimes we are…
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MC65 Building a Network Outside Your Organisation
As managers we will normally have a peer network within our company. But occasionally we might experience problems that our in-house peer network can't help us with. For example, when the issue is with those same colleagues or our organisation itself. At times like this an external professional...
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MC64 Men's Mental Health at Work
Our hosts discuss the recent research by Jindi Mann into men's emotional experiences at work. It is easily downloaded as a pdf and it's freely available - no email signup or any hoops to jump through. They surveyed 55 male managers, primarily British and working in a mid to senior management…
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MC63 Are Our Brains Wired for Modern Leadership?
Pilar and Tim discuss the fascinating article 3 Ways Our Brains Undermine Our Ability to Be a Good Leader by Cian McEnroe and David Rock at the Neuroleadership Institute. David's book "Your Brain at Work" was one of the first to bring brain science into leadership. In this latest research they...
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MC62 Getting the most out of one on ones as a manager
Action-centred leadership asks managers to juggle three priorities: the team, the task and the individual. and in this conversation Pilar and Tim discuss one-on-one meetings, one of the best tools that managers have to work on their relationship with an individual employee. Over coffee we talk...
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MC61 Emotional Leadership Theory
Going deeper into their exploration of different leadership styles, and inspired by this article on the MindTools blog, Pilar and Tim look at the Emotional Leadership Theory pioneered by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee. It ends up being another therapy session in the café as…
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MC60 Who ends up in management positions?
There are far too many leaders who don't really want to be managers. Given most workers cite their manager as their main reason for leaving a company, this is a big problem. It's hard to love your job when your boss hates theirs. How do so many people end up as managers when they shouldn't? Who...
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MC59 Action-centred leadership: a truly useful model
Continuing with our discussions on leadership frameworks, Pilar and Tim discuss John Adair's Action-Centred Leadership which was first introduced in 1973. Adair uses three overlapping circles to illustrate that effective leadership happens at the intersection of the task, the team and the...
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MC58 Leadership on a spectrum: Laissez-faire and authoritative Styles
Inspired by the article about leadership on the Asana blog, Pilar and Tim discuss Kurt Lewin's 3 leadership styles. In a seminal study conducted in 1939, groups of 10 year old children were given a craft task and assigned an adult leader using either an authoritarian, democratic or laissez-faire...
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MC57 The role of emotions when hiring
Inspired by Liz and Mollie's wonderful book "No Hard Feelings" we talk about the role of emotions in our work, especially when hiring. One of the key principles in this book is that our emotions are a part of who we are at work and they impact our behaviour. Being aware of this helps us better...
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MC56 All eyes are on you: Role modelling behaviours as a manager.
One of the pressures we can feel as a manager is the pressure of attention. We watch our managers closely. We analyse their behaviours and motivations. We guess at their intentions. And this informs our judgements about cultural norms and which behaviours are encouraged or discouraged. In fact…
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MC55 The challenge of remote disengagement
For this episode we used a different format. Pilar and Tim spotted a question in a community they're members of, and with the permission of the poster, we've chosen to discuss it over coffee. This was the question: "Remote workers are faking enthusiasm. As a manager, I struggle to assess the...
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MC54 Why We Love "Radical Candor" by Kim Scott (and why implementing it is so hard!)
We reference this book all the time. In today's conversation we learn why Radical Candor resonates so much with us and how we've used it in our own work. The core principles of the book shouldn't really feel radical, it should be commonplace to care about the people we work with and tell them our...
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MC53 The problem with motivating others
As a manager our success is really dependent on the success of our teams. Yet there is something a bit topsy-turvy about the idea that managers are responsible for the motivation of our people. Much of motivation is intrinsic, most people inherently want to do good work. In fact often times work,...
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MC52 The problem with adopting Amazon's one-pagers and other best practices
Jeff Bezos called the one-pager the "smartest thing we ever did at Amazon". And everywhere we look there are best practices and frameworks which worked wonders for big & successful organisations. So why do they often fail when we apply them in our organisations? We propose that best practices are...
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Taking a break from our coffee breaks
A quick voice note to let you know that we'll be back in a couple of weeks. Until then, let us know if you have any questions you'd like us to answer on the show, or any topics you'd like us to tackle. Get in touch through our Contact Form https://managementcafepodcast.com/contact/
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MC51 Manager as umbrella: Protecting the team from the storm
The notion of a manager as a protector of the team is deeply embedded. After all, a primary part of any manager's job is to remove roadblocks and distractions so their team can stay focussed on their objectives. But it's not always easy to decide what will distract the team versus what might be...
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MC50 Celebrating big and small
We tend to miss the smaller moments of achievement. Our focus is often on big organisational or team goals, huge milestones where we come together to celebrate (like the 50th episode of Management Cafe!). But in today's coffee catchup we are talking about more personal achievements. The sort of...
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MC49 Manager burnout
Is it just us, or does it feel like the last few years have been a particularly torrid time for managers? Managers have always been the interface between employees and their organisation. They act as a kind of translator between the two. In recent years there have been extraordinary challenges in...
About this show
Season 4: Join co-hosts Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti as they chat about what they've learned through their time leading teams. Season 3: Oh No, My Team's Gone Remote! Seasons 1 and 2: Improve your management and leadership practice over a cup of coffee and get a book recommendation too. The role of the manager is evolving as technology helps us to self-organise and take more control of how and where we work from. In this podcast, Pilar Orti from Virtual not Distant, dissects modern management practice, not just for official managers, but for team members who want to make things happen too.
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Virtual not Distant
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