The Manager Track

Free download: Get the Episode 336 cliff notes, with all 5 lines, the scripts for hijacked meetings and the landing gear setup: resources.archova.org/336 When a meeting gets stuck, watch who gets it moving again. Often it's someone who has barely spoken, and what they finally say is a question about what the conversation is for. 25 minutes into a 45-minute meeting, 2 people are still debating feat...

Free download: Get the Episode 335 cliff notes, with the 4-step calm correction, the exact scripts and the 3-question check: resources.archova.org/335 Someone on your team rolls their eyes when you introduce a new process. Or makes a joke about your decision in the team meeting, and a couple of people laugh. Or takes a concern straight to your manager, and you only hear about it from your manager....

Free download: Get the cliff notes, including exact lines to use and a one-on-one prep worksheet here: resources.archova.org/334 You ask your direct report a handful of questions in a one-on-one and leave feeling like you coached them well. They leave wondering why you didn't just say what you wanted. That gap is common. In a Zenger Folkman study of 3,761 leaders, 24% rated their own coaching skil...

If you've ever read an email from someone on your team and caught yourself thinking they sound like ChatGPT, you probably took it a little less seriously. Your team does the same thing with your messages. Managers now use AI to draft feedback, prep difficult conversations, write performance reviews, and polish status updates. On paper, the output is often good. The trouble starts when the words ar...

Starting this week, our episodes come with downloadable cliff notes, so you have the scripts and tools in front of you when you need them. Grab this week's here: https://resources.archova.org/episode-332/ ________ You got the job but now one person on your team has been doing this work longer than you've had a career, and you can feel them watching how you handle it. So you do one of two things. Y...

When a senior leader handles a hard question at an all-hands and makes it look easy, it's natural to assume they were born comfortable in front of a room and you weren't. Kathryn Janicek has spent her career watching that assumption fall apart. As a 3-time Emmy-winning TV news producer, she put Fortune 500 CEOs on camera for 20 years and saw how many of them arrived unprepared. Today she coaches l...

The perception of how senior you are gets built in rooms you are not in, using text you wrote in about forty seconds. A skip level reads three of your Slack messages. A peer forwards your email two levels up and never mentions it. None of those people hear your voice, catch the warmth you would bring in person, or hold the context you were carrying when you typed it. In writing you do not control...

You give a good answer. Clear, accurate, done in one sentence. Then you keep going. You add the context, the caveat, the option you considered and did not pick. All of it is true but together it tells the room something you never meant to say. The person who asked was not doubting you. By the end of your answer, they are. Not because the decision was weak, but because you spent ninety seconds defe...

You have done it a hundred times. Someone senior asks where things stand, and you give them the full picture: every work stream accounted for, clear timelines, nothing missed. Sure, you must have sounded competent and in control. But what if that type of response actually costs you authority? Most managers never catch this happening, because nothing about the update looked wrong. The cost shows up...

Most resistance to growth never announces itself. It shows up as a calendar that will not cooperate, a quarter that is too full, a leadership program that would be a better fit next year. Maren Perry, founder and CEO of Arden Coaching, has spent twenty years working with senior leaders and executives. She can identify what usually lies beneath that scheduling problem. People reach senior roles bec...

Someone on your team does something you do not like. It is small, so you let it go. It happens again a few weeks later, and you let that one go too. By the third time, you are irritated, and now you are carrying six weeks of unspoken frustration into a thirty-minute feedback conversation. Even if you keep your cool, that pressure goes somewhere. Into your tone, your body language, sometimes the wo...

Sometime in the next few months, a decision will land on your desk that makes half the room unhappy. It will show up on an ordinary Tuesday, in a week that was already full, and you will have about a day to decide. Most managers meet that moment with instinct and hope. When the team performs and nothing breaks, principles never get tested. Ramona calls this sunshine leadership. Then a decision get...

Six months ago you sat next to these people. You complained about leadership together, covered for each other when something slipped, and knew exactly what got said in the hallway versus in the meeting. Now you run the team, and every one of those unspoken rules is up for renegotiation. Most new managers handle this by saying nothing and hoping the awkwardness fades. Ramona did exactly that after...

Somewhere along the way, you picked up the idea that thoughtful ICs wait until they’re ready before going for the manager role. So you keep asking the question. Am I ready? And every time you ask it, it feels responsible. It feels like preparing. Ramona has watched that exact question stall talented ICs for years. It has no evidence standard and no end date, which means you can ask it forever whil...

You walk into a meeting with senior people, and within seconds the internal questions start: Should I speak early or wait until I’m asked? Am I reading the mood right, or am I about to present data to a room that wants something else entirely? And when the energy shifts mid-meeting, someone influential goes quiet, the questions turn political, the doubt gets louder: do I name what’s happening, or...

There is a thought a lot of managers carry around and almost never say out loud: “Honestly, my direct report is a stronger performer than I am.” If you have had some version of that thought, it usually shows up with a little shame attached. And the standard response, someone telling you that you are great and you do it better than your employee, tends to bounce right off. It does not fix anything,...

There is a small flinch that happens when someone hands a high performer a compliment. A pause. A quiet thought of “I wonder if they really mean it,” followed by a fast handoff of the credit to the team, to luck, to timing, to anything other than themselves. Most people doing this have no idea it is a pattern. It reads as humility, so it hides in plain sight. Every time you move a win into the tea...

It usually shows up disguised as one of your strengths. You are the manager who notices the gap before anyone else does and quietly fills it. The deck gets polished, the deadline gets saved, the client never sees the mess. From the outside, you look reliable. What no one sees is that you are carrying two or three people's work on top of your own and falling behind on the things only you can do. In...

You used to manage six people. Then a reorg, a hiring freeze, or a quiet round of cuts took out the layer above you, and now you are managing twelve. Same hours in the day, but double the team. Maybe a few dotted-line reports nobody else is covering, too. This is the Great Flattening, and the data is not subtle. Manager engagement has dropped to its lowest point in years, burnout among managers no...

You walk in on day one and the team is already a fully formed thing. They have inside jokes you don't get, a process you didn't design, and a read on you that started forming before you said a word. You didn't choose them. They didn't choose you. And every one of them is quietly deciding whether you are about to make their work life better or worse. Here is the trap almost every new manager falls...

In this episode, Ramona sits down with David Dean, a technologist with close to two decades inside complex organizations and the author of a new book, An Inbox Between Us. David calls himself a business AI realist. His core idea is that every company runs on two versions of itself: the official version in your job descriptions, SOPs, and leadership decks, and the unwritten contract, the side conve...

Most leadership advice tells you what to think. Be more decisive, be more empathetic, give better feedback, and so on. Charlie Munger spent his life paying attention to the layer underneath all of that, which is how to think. He never wrote a leadership book. He never gave a TED Talk on management. And yet his thinking tools hold up better in a real team meeting than most material on the leadershi...

Here is something most managers do not realize about themselves. The way you respond when someone gives you feedback is the clearest signal of how much control you are quietly exerting on your team. If you find yourself explaining, defending, or clarifying what you really meant the next time a direct report or peer pushes back on something, that defensiveness is not a personality quirk. It is cont...

You schedule the one-on-ones. You show up. You take notes. You walk out feeling like a good manager, and your direct report walks out without having mentioned the thing they actually came to talk about. Most managers do not have a "I am not doing one-on-ones" problem. They have a "my one-on-ones quietly turned into status meetings and I do not like it" problem. The meeting that should be the most...

You might think your team is using AI well. Everyone has access to the tools. People are experimenting. The meeting notes get cleaned up faster. The emails go out a little quicker. On the surface, progress. But there's a pattern most teams don't notice until someone names it: all of that activity is still individual. One person's calculator on one person's desk. The AI is making individual tasks f...