The long-term capital story by Roger Lowenstein documents this in terms of bringing Nobel Laureates together. And so you bring together superstar musicians, you bring together superstars in the world of finance.
How could this happen?Īnd so one of the things we talk about in the book is that this is something that happens over, and over, and over again. And these were supposedly the best of the world. And they lost to very small countries Puerto Rico, Lithuania, Argentina. And these were the best of the best in the world. So if you have Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, in 1992 Larry Bird, all of them it was a dream. TANYA MENON: Absolutely, and so some of these dream teams have truly been a dream. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: The NBA All-Star Olympic team, yeah. So the classic example of this was the Olympic team, the dream team Olympic team– And super groups are exactly the types of groups that you talk about– superstars. The brilliant people are just going to start coming together, coordinating their work almost spontaneously, and you can step back, relax, do your other things– you have plenty of other stuff to do– and creativity is going to happen and the group’s going to be great.Īnd what we end up starting this chapter with is a few stories about what they call super groups.
All you do is the interview, hire the right people, and you’re done. And so with this particular idea, it sounds great. TANYA MENON: This is exactly the place where we start our chapter on macro management from. But what if you have really talented people? I’ve seen a lot of advice out there just saying, hey, if you’ve hired the best people, you should just stay out of the way. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So I guess some people would say maybe they worry about not being hands-on enough with a team that’s inexperienced or a team of so-called B-players. It was frustrating them, because what they ended up with was chaos instead. And the macro management trap is being too hands off, delegating, empowering too much.Īnd one of the things we observed in our teaching, in our research, and in the classroom is that students have been sold, and managers have been sold, a whole lot of information about empowerment, and participation, and giving people simply freedom. And they find themselves in the macro management trap. And they go a little bit extreme as they do so. And so then many managers say, well, if micromanagement is so bad well let me flip over to the other side. We don’t want to be watched over by other people. As Americans, one of the things that we say is we want to be free. And the research shows that people just despise this.Īnd so when we talk about it in the book– there’s a lot of cultural reasons for this. So the manager is watching your every move, monitoring you. And micro management, as everybody knows, is the equivalent of a helicopter parent in the workplace. TANYA MENON: Yeah, so when we talk in this book about macromanagement– I guess it’s a catchy term and all that– but what we were very interested in is that, maybe it’s for cultural reasons, we have very much overemphasized micro management. And I thought it would make sense to start there, because we’ve heard so much about micromanagement. I wanted to just dive in and start talking about some of the traps that you described in the book that managers fall into that lead to waste or what you call in the book, “action without traction.” One of these was macromanagement. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah, me too, me too. Tanya thank you so much for talking with us. She’s the co-author with Leigh Thompson of the new book Stop Spending, Start Managing, Strategies to Transform Wasteful Habits.
I’m talking today with Tanya Menon, an associate professor at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. She’s the co-author of Stop Spending, Start Managing: Strategies to Transform Wasteful Habits.
Tanya Menon, associate professor at Fisher College of Management, Ohio State University, explains how to recognize if your management style is too hands off.