Learning Path 28
Running a Team
The working manager's route. Who owns which call, how to hire so the loop predicts something, what delegation actually has to specify, how to run a one-to-one that surfaces a resignation before it happens, and how to handle performance without waiting for an annual review. Written for someone with a team on Monday.
- Intermediate
- ~8h estimated
- 6 modules
- 36 topics
Why this path matters
Almost nobody is taught to manage before they are asked to do it. The first year is then spent rediscovering, expensively, that most team problems are design problems: an unclear decision right, a metric that pays for the wrong thing, a delegation nobody defined the edges of.
What you will understand
- Who decides, what gets measured, and what it pays.
Modules in this path
How a Company Decides · Organization Design
- Decision Rights and Who Owns Which Call
- Organizational Architecture: Decision Rights, Measurement, and Reward
- Span of Control and the Arithmetic of Layers
- Centralization versus Local Knowledge
- Matrix Organizations and Dual Reporting
- Information Flow and Where a Company Goes Blind
Incentives and Agency · Organization Design
- Designing Variable Pay That Survives Contact with Reality
- Goodhart's Law and Metrics That Get Gamed
- The Multitask Problem and Why Paying for One Thing Kills the Other
- Relative Performance Evaluation and Tournament Pay
- Quotas, Accelerators, and the Ratchet Effect
- Relational Contracts and the Promise a Manager Cannot Enforce
Coordination and Internal Markets · Organization Design
- Internal Markets and Charging for Shared Resources
- Profit Centers, Cost Centers, and the Accountability Each Creates
- Shared Services versus Embedded Teams
- Coordination Cost and Why Adding People Slows a Project
- Process Design and Where the Handoffs Leak
- Organizational Slack and the Cost of Running at Full Utilization
Hiring and Building the Team · Organization Design
- Defining a Role Before You Hire for It
- Structured Interviews and What Actually Predicts Performance
- Adverse Selection in Hiring and the Reference Problem
- The Cost of a Bad Hire, Honestly Calculated
- Compensation Bands and Internal Pay Equity
- Onboarding as a Ninety-day System
Managing People and Performance · Organization Design
- Delegation and the Levels of Authority
- One-to-ones and the Manager's Information Loop
- Performance Management Without Annual-review Theater
- Managing Someone Out and the Conversation Nobody Schedules
- Regretted Attrition and What Actually Makes People Leave
- Managing Managers and the Second-line Problem
Culture, Bias, and Failure Modes · Organization Design
- Culture as Whatever Behavior Gets Rewarded
- Escalation of Commitment and the Project Nobody Will Kill
- Groupthink, Dissent, and the Pre-mortem
- Empire Building and the Internal Capital Market Distortion
- Why Incentive Systems Fail and How to Audit One
- The Founder-to-manager Transition and the First Fifty People
Suggested tools
Suggested case studies
After this path: The General Manager