The Manager Lab

When teams are overloaded, managers often become the bottleneck by absorbing work or pushing staff harder. This episode summarizes Melody Wilding’s Harvard Business Review advice and tells the story of a leader who burned out doing others’ work. It offers five practical moves: have the team decide what to pause, make decision rules visible, hand off authority (not just tasks), tie new work to people’s goals, and be honest about priorities and strain, plus a simple one-week homework plan to get time back and grow your team.

In this episode Greg Gillum introduces Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team using a business fable about a tech company whose talented leaders can’t work together. The core idea: teamwork is a behavior problem, not a talent problem, and it can be fixed. Greg explains the five-layer pyramid—trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results—and gives practical steps for managers: diagnose the lowest broken layer, coach behaviors, run a quick team self-check, and start the work of modeling healthier team habits. Next episode focuses on the foundation: trust.

This episode challenges the idea that eagerness equals readiness and argues that hesitation can be a sign of maturity, not a red flag. It explains why people hesitate, how to diagnose the reasons, and gives five practical actions managers can take: audit for loudness bias, change the question, make the job concrete, match development to the type of hesitation, and decide instead of persuading.

Host Greg Gillum explores Michelle Geelan’s new book Resilient Optimism and explains how optimism is a behavior, not a feeling. The episode breaks down five practical manager moves—recalibrate mindset, transform stress, triage commitments, recharge smarter, and connect the dots—to help teams stay engaged amid change and uncertainty. Try one behavior this week, model it for your team, and watch small actions build momentum and trust. This episode gives clear, actionable steps managers can use Monday morning to improve team climate and resilience.

This episode explains how to handle a team member who underperforms but is protected by relationships, legacy, or embedded knowledge — creating an accountability gap where you own outcomes but not the leverage to change them. It offers five practical moves: diagnose the type of protection, test your boss with a small concrete ask, redistribute control through structure, decide what you will carry (and document it), and hold the line so standards apply to everyone.