Management For Startups Podcast
The Management for Startups Podcast is a weekly show by Cedric Chin that covers the basics of management for startups, small teams, and organisations between 2-50 people. The goal is to produce a complete resource for new managers on the startup treadmill.
- Update frequency
- every 8 days
- Average duration
- 14 minutes
- Episodes
- 35
- Years Active
- 2018 - 2020
#15 The Manager's Job Revisited
The Manager's Job is the core of MFS's management philosophy. But I recently realised that The Manager's Job could be interpreted negatively — that is, be used to justify output at any costs.
This w…
#14 The Training Heuristic for Firing
This week's episode is about a heuristic we used at my old role. Basically: "if you can't train a given subordinate, let them go."
This heuristic governed the way we thought about our probation progr…
#13 What Seymour Papert has to Teach Us about Training
Seymour Papert's life work was about how humans learnt. We look at his big idea — knowledge construction — and draw on it to learn how to become a better trainer, and therefore a better manager.
And…
#12 The Fundamental Attribution Error
The Fundamental Attribution Error is a cognitive bias from social psychology — one that affects our interactions with other people, and one that everyone is vulnerable to. This week, we talk about gu…
#11 The Positional Power Barrier
The positional power barrier is my name for the power differential between manager and subordinate. It affects nearly every interaction you'll have with your people, and it can be quite insidious, be…
#10 The Optimal Number
What's the optimal number a manager should have? The most common answer to this question is 7±2. But why is this the case, and why is it important to know one's limits? This week, we explore some int…
#9 Summarising The Bare Minimum Series
This episode marks the end of the mini-series 'The Bare Minimum You Need to Know to Be An Adequate Manager'. We close with a summary of the techniques we've learnt over the past eight episodes, and t…
#8: One-on-Ones: The 3 Kinds of One-on-Ones
Hopefully you're convinced by now that doing one-on-ones is useful and potentially valuable to your management practice.
In this episode, we cover the 3 kinds of one-on-ones that you'll experience o…
#7 One-on-Ones: How Should You Do Them?
In this episode, we cover the little details about actually doing one-on-ones. How do you determine the best frequency for your team? What goes into a typical one-on-one? What are some principles to …
#6 One-on-Ones: Why Do Them?
One-on-ones get a lot of flak — both inside and outside the tech industry. What are they good for, and why even do them? I tell two stories that hopefully highlight what one-on-ones are good for, and…
#5 Prioritisation
Prioritisation will make the biggest difference to your ability to remain sane as a manager. The most important side effect of learning prioritisation is to gain the ability to say no to certain mana…
#4 The Manager's Job
The Manager's Job is a lens through which one may understand all of management. In this episode, we discuss the downstream implications of this framework, and how it helps when thinking about the oth…
#3 Training
In the last episode, we talked about how training and delegation are two halves of the same process. In this episode, we explore how to do training in service of better delegation — the basics all th…
#2: Delegation
We know delegation can be done badly — the English language has a word to describe bad delegation: micro-management. Why is it that new managers sometimes micro-manage, even when they know it's a bad…
#1: Introducing Management for Startups
Management for Startups is a podcast dedicated to the new manager on the startup treadmill. In this episode, we discuss the goal of the podcast, and talk about the focus for the next six to eight epi…