Management Café October 2023: Men's Mental Health, Building a Network and Conversation Dynamics
Looking for a podcast about leadership and management to accompany you during your coffee break? Join Pilar Orti and Tim Burgess for 25 minutes (more or less) of informal chat about leading teams. We now have coffee every other week.
From this page you can listen to our Management Café March episodes - but we recommend you subscribe to the show on your favourite podcast app, or subscribe to the Management Café blog, where we post the show notes.
We’d love to hear what you think of the show, so feel free to drop us a note with your comments, or suggestions for new episodes.
#64 Men’s mental health at work
Our hosts discuss the recent research by Jindi Mann into men’s emotional experiences at work. It is easily downloaded as a pdf and it’s freely available – no email signup or any hoops to jump through. They surveyed 55 male managers, primarily British and working in a mid to senior management role. The results show a surprisingly broad range of responses. Over coffee Pilar and Tim explore what it means to be a male manager. A big theme that emerges is that whilst 21st century corporate leadership has been dominated by men, men feel limited in how much of themselves they can bring to work.
#65 Building a network outside your organisation
As managers we will normally have a peer network within our company. But occasionally we might experience problems that our in-house peer network can’t help us with. For example, when the issue is with those same colleagues or our organisation itself. At times like this an external professional network can be invaluable.
In this conversation Pilar and Tim primarily talk about networks which can provide different forms of support such as showing a different perspective, learning from someone with more or different experience, getting greater clarity in your own thoughts through talking them out, or even just solidarity from someone who’s suffered in a similar way.
No surprise that our hosts, who have never met in person, have both had success in building relationships and networks online. Over coffee they share some of the techniques that have worked for them to expand and sustain their professional networks.
#66 Managing the dynamics of individual conversations
Pilar and Tim have a meta conversation about conversations. Participating in a good conversation means we listen, we get to talk, we feel heard, we deepen our understanding of a topic and we build connection with the other person.
However not all conversations are created equal. Sometimes we are in a glorious free flowing exchange of ideas and other times we have internal dialogues about the conversation running parallel with the conversation itself.
“Am I talking too much?” or
“Are they talking enough?” or
“Is this conversation going the way I/they wanted it to?” or even
“Are they paying attention?”
Paying attention is important, let’s not get too caught up in our meta thoughts that we forget to be present and attentive! As you can see, there is a lot going on. Luckily the Management Cafe is a safe space for deep thinking and discussion…
