The BusinessBalls Blog
Short, practical writing on leadership, management, and the messy bits of work life.
-
You're delegating the task. You're not delegating the decision.
Most delegation fails not because the wrong person got the work, but because the manager handed over the task while quietly holding on to every meaningful choice.
-
When your best person becomes your hardest problem
High performers don't get worse all at once. They get worse gradually, and managers let them — because the output is still good and the conversation feels ungrateful.
-
When your team stops arguing, start worrying
Culture doesn't rot loudly. The first warning sign isn't conflict — it's the quiet disappearance of disagreement, and most managers mistake it for harmony.
-
In defence of management by walking around
The most dismissed management technique of the 1980s solved a problem most managers still have today: they only hear what people decide to tell them in meetings.
-
Managing up without the slime
Managing up has a reputation problem — but the alternative isn't integrity, it's just being quietly mismanaged by your own boss.
-
Stop using the feedback sandwich
The positive-negative-positive feedback structure feels considerate but consistently fails to land the message — and the person it protects most is the manager giving it.
-
Your 1:1s are status reports in disguise
Most managers run 1:1s as informal catch-ups about task progress — which wastes the one meeting format designed specifically for the human side of management.
-
You delegated it. Now stop doing it.
Delegation fails not because managers refuse to hand over work, but because they can't stop picking it back up — and the cost lands entirely on the person they delegated to.
-
The time diary you'd never want to read
Research has repeatedly shown that managers wildly misperceive how they spend their time — and the gap between belief and reality explains a lot about why work feels out of control.
-
When your best performer becomes your worst headache
What to do when a top performer turns difficult — why the usual management instinct backfires, and how to have the conversation that actually shifts things.
-
Welcome to the BusinessBalls Blog
We're launching a short-form blog to sit alongside our 525+ articles — covering practical leadership, the messy bits of management, and what we're seeing in workplaces right now.
-
The meeting that could have been an email — and the email that should have been a meeting
We've been told for a decade to fight meeting bloat. But the opposite mistake — pushing a real conversation into a Slack thread — is now doing more damage to teams than the meetings ever did.
-
Three questions to ask before you add another OKR
OKRs are a planning tool, not a productivity tool. If you're tempted to add another, run it through these three filters first — most won't survive.