Truth, Lies & Work

Leadership and Management

Leadership and Management

The show's recurring thread on what leadership and management actually are — from formal leadership theory to the everyday reality of accidental managers.

What's been said

  • Leadership is a process, not a person. Danny Wareham's Constellation Leadership research (Navy SEALs, small businesses under Dunbar's number) found that in the right conditions performance can increase without a formal leader — culture, purpose and behavioural norms replace top-down control . "Who's the leader when the leader's not in the room?" — the answer is a fluid, context-driven process, not a title.
  • The accidental manager crisis is real and under-treated. Isabel Berwick's central theme: people get promoted into managing teams with zero training, and listening, empathy and trust matter more than traditional leadership traits .
  • Managing people you dislike is a skill. Berwick on the practical craft: reverse mentoring, teaching younger workers that silence is okay, and handling the people you don't click with .
  • Vulnerability is a discerning share, not a synonym for oversharing. On the Truth or Lie segment, Alexis Zahner and Sally Clarke argue "vulnerability" has been flattened into a buzzword — the useful version is a discerning share of the self, which requires good judgement about what, when and with whom .
  • Culture is built uphill — and leaders often break it. Leading through burnout while running on empty, and the specific mistakes leaders make when trying to fix culture, are recurring Workplace Surgery themes .

The episodes & clips that cover this

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  • Truth or Lie: Does Vulnerability Make You a Better Leader?

    It's both, isn't it, really? I think this is a term that we hear a lot in recent years, especially in leadership workplace culture conversations. I think the problem with it is that vulnerability has

  • Building the Right Culture Uphill

    There you go. So that's also a very good resource. Great. Okay, now question number 2, how do you lead the right culture when the organization won't? So my organization talks a lot about values like p

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  • Workplace Surgery: Mistakes leaders make fixing culture

    That they're trying to fix culture, that they think they can fix culture. Culture is really complicated and really nuanced. We don't have an agreed definition on culture as psychologists. We don't hav

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  • Can culture genuinely replace the leader?

    You said right at the top that, can culture replace the leader? You're not allowed to say it depends Yeah, I think it does. Yeah, it does. You know, who's the leader when the leader's not in the room

  • Key takeaways — leadership as a process, not a person

    That was the incredible Danny Wareham, and I hope he's made you think carefully about leadership and whether we even need leaders at all This is the key idea. The leader doesn't actually need to be a

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  • The accidental manager crisis

    Okay. So it's not my phrase. It's what it's, um, I think the Chartered Management Institute came up with it and it's great. So an accidental manager is someone who hasn't had any training to be a mana

  • The power of reverse mentoring

    You talked in your book about reverse mentoring. Um, so was that kind of, was there a symbiotic relationship between you and was it Debbie, you said? Oh, I very much doubt it. I really like reverse me

  • How to manage people you really dislike

    How do you manage people you really, really dislike? I really wanted to write about this because I think this is one of the great undertalked about things at work. I think in the rest of our lives, we

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