Breaking the Circle for Leaders

Send us Fan Mail I was new in the role, mid shop visit, when someone came and found me to say there was a manager on the phone. A customer had come in saying they'd eaten one of our products and it had broken their tooth. I told them to take the details, fill a complaint form in, offer a replacement or a refund as a gesture of goodwill. Then I left them to it and got on with my week. As far a...

Send us Fan Mail  I'd trained for the Great North Run for six months. Three runs a week since March, never missed one. My sixth in a row, and this year I wanted it to be my fastest.  Two days before the race, four ton bags of logs were tipped into my back lane. I'd ordered them in August to beat the winter prices, and when the supplier offered me the Friday, I heard the price and never r...

Send us Fan Mail I once took over a restaurant for a colleague who was going on maternity leave. Lunchtimes were properly busy. Tables full, buffet orders going out one after another. It looked like a place making decent money. The system didn't agree. I'd look at the tables actually being served, then look at what was logged, and the two didn't match. It took a few days of watching...

Send us Fan Mail A few years ago I was sat with a coaching client in her early twenties. She'd just moved to a new company, and she'd gone in as a supervisor. What made that odd is what she'd been doing before. Her manager had been off sick for about six months, and she'd covered the whole department in the meantime. Most of the job, most of the time. When I asked her about it...

Send us Fan Mail I used to do unannounced Sunday visits, four or five times a year, to see what things really looked like when there weren't many managers about. One Sunday I got up, got ready, drove there on autopilot, pulled into the car park and just sat there. Nothing had happened. That's the part I still find hard to explain. I just had nothing in me that wanted to get out of the ca...

Send us Fan Mail When I was eighteen I raced a Mini on grass tracks. A mate of mine looked after the engine, and every so often he'd ask me the same question. Is it running fine? And I'd say yes. Every time. I wasn't lying to him. I genuinely couldn't hear anything wrong. He'd get in, listen for about four seconds and ask me how I couldn't hear that flatness. And I co...

Send us Fan Mail I was at Greggs, managing daily fresh product into around five hundred shops across London and the South East. Hundreds of lines, thousands of decisions a week. Then the company restructured and a new operations director arrived. Every week he'd ask me detailed questions I couldn't always answer. Why didn't those ten shops get enough doughnuts yesterday. What happen...

Send us Fan Mail At twenty three I was running the bar at a hotel. Then the food and beverage manager left, so I picked that up. Then reception landed on me as well. I was living in, working six days a week, and holding the whole operation together. And when the promotion came around, I didn't get it. For years I told myself that was down to the new general manager, who I didn't get on w...

Send us Fan Mail I bought a bag of wonky potatoes because they were cheaper. Got them home, cut one open, and inside it was exactly the same as any other potato. The only thing anyone had ever judged was the outside. That got me thinking about a label of my own. Growing up, my mum used to say I was very practical. My older brother was the academic one. She meant it kindly, and she meant nothing by...

Breaking the Circle is the podcast for middle managers who feel stuck in the same cycles — working hard but going round in circles. Each week Jon Manning takes a real management situation, tells a story, and draws out practical insight you can use the next day. Not theory. Real tools from someone who's been in the room. Subscribe now — episode one coming soon