Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Casting Call - my favorite leadership podcast

In this post I want to share a podcast with you that has been an enormous source of actionable advice and inspiration to me as a leader.

The podcast is Manager Tools, and can be found at http://www.manager-tools.com/.

I was first introduced to the podcast early in it's life (around 2005). At the time I had been in leadership roles for 10 years, had done an MBA, a number of leadership training courses, and had worked with some outstanding mentors. Despite this there has been much for me to learn from this weekly cast, which continues to deliver new and useful content.

Much of the inspiration for this blog came from the manager tools podcast, and I can say that they were a major contributor to my third critical element of leadership (communication).

Along the lines of communication, a great insight provided by Mike and Mark (who deliver the cast) is that moving from individual contributor roles to leadership positions is about moving from being task focused to people focused. That is, making sure your people are taken care of before your own tasks. It's great advice for task-focused engineers (like me). While it seems obvious, it really isn't (see my comment on the post on the best advice you've ever received and how much the meaning of a single sentence can change over time).

I hope you enjoy the podcast and would love to see some comments back on this post regarding your thoughts on this great resource. Also, let us know if there are other podcasts you listen to which you'd recommend.