Over the last couple of days I’ve been catching up on a podcast I found through iTunes called Manager Tools created by Michael Auzenne and Mark Horstman. Each episode is about 30 minutes or so and give advice and useful process around things you should be doing to improve your skills as a manager.

Over the last two days I’ve listened to about four episodes around the subjects of one on one meetings and effective delegation. Both subjects were made very interesting by the hosts. The great thing about this podcast is that each subject, by design, comes with actionable things you can do to begin implementing what they are talking about. The subject of One on Ones were split actually between three episodes, two on the subject and one on Q&A they received after the episodes were released. This was great content and the hosts give you tools for organizing the information with one on ones and some of the pitfalls you might run into while implementing them.

This is another one of those “niche” type of broadcasts that make podcasting so valuable. You don’t find this kind of programming on the radio.

I think the only negative feedback I have on the show is that their podcast RSS feed does not include all of the episodes, forcing me to go outside of the iTunes podcast interface in order to get older shows. This causes a little extra work in retrieving and cleanup of older episodes since these are managed outside of the iTunes podcast interface. I suppose this could also be user ignorance, but I prefer not to think about it that way … 😉

Aside from the limitation on the RSS feed though, the content is great and I highly recommend that you listen to these podcasts if you have direct reports. I read a lot of management books, and while I’ve read a few good ones, I haven’t walked away from any of the books I’ve read the way I’ve walked away from the morning drive listening to these shows. They contain a really good, practical, actionable, and surprisingly interesting content by a couple of guys who really like what they do and want to share what they’ve learned over their careers.