Macromanagement Is Just as Bad as Micromanagement

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael. I’m talking today with Tanya Menon, an associate professor at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. She’s the co-author with Leigh Thompson of the new book Stop Spending, Start Managing, Strategies to Transform Wasteful Habits. Tanya thank you so much for talking with us.

TANYA MENON: Thank you so much Sarah. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah, me too, me too. 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. And I thought it would make sense to start there, because we’ve heard so much about micromanagement. But what’s macro management?

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 micro management, as everybody knows, is the equivalent of a helicopter parent in the workplace. So the manager is watching your every move, monitoring you. And the research shows that people just despise this.

And so when we talk about it in the book– there’s a lot of cultural reasons for this. As Americans, one of the things that we say is we want to be free. We want to be independent. We don’t want to be watched over by other people. And so then many managers say, well, if micromanagement is so bad well let me flip over to the other side. And they go a little bit extreme as they do so. And they find themselves in the macro management trap. And the macro management trap is being too hands off, delegating, empowering too much.

And 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 it was costing them. It was frustrating them, because what they ended up with was chaos instead.

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. 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.

TANYA MENON: This is exactly the place where we start our chapter on macro management from. And so with this particular idea, it sounds great. All you do is the interview, hire the right people, and you’re done. Let the magic happen. 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.

And what we end up starting this chapter with is a few stories about what they call super groups. And super groups are exactly the types of groups that you talk about– superstars. You bring the best of the best together. So the classic example of this was the Olympic team, the dream team Olympic team–

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: The NBA All-Star Olympic team, yeah.

TANYA MENON: Absolutely, and so some of these dream teams have truly been a dream. So if you have Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, in 1992 Larry Bird, all of them it was a dream. But in 2004 in Athens, they had LeBron. They had Tim Duncan, Allen Iverson. And these were the best of the best in the world. And they lost to very small countries Puerto Rico, Lithuania, Argentina. And these were supposedly the best of the world. How could this happen?

And 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 so you bring together superstar musicians, you bring together superstars in the world of finance. The long-term capital story by Roger Lowenstein documents this in terms of bringing Nobel Laureates together. And what happens in this situation is, again, they tank. How could this happen? And so that’s where we start with. And the answers are really predictable as well.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What ends up happening?

TANYA MENON: What we talk about in the book is just usual, same old disorganized committee. And these are so understructured. There is not a single individual oftentimes who’s setting up norms, setting up a roles. There may be too many people. I’ve been on committees where there’s 25 people in the room. Why do you need 25 people in the room to do anything? And some of them are listening in, some of them I don’t even know why they’re there. And so we– I don’t even know who they are.

We look at all of this waste. So the wasting of time occurs so much more egregiously, very often, than the wasting of money. And when we use the analogy in the book, you bring together a whole bunch of musical instruments and say, now play. You’re going to get noise. You’re going to get chaos. It’s going to be cacophonous. And that’s what you end up seeing in these kinds of environments. And so you have to help people know what is the instrument they should play, what is the right time to play it in, and how they can do all of this.

And so these are just some metaphors and analogies that I think are very helpful, because we’ve been oversold on this idea that just be free. You can do whatever you want. People are going to create magic together. And it’s just not the case. And people at work know this, but sometimes as leaders we just want to believe in this delegation, and empowerment, and all of this.

And so really thinking about the structure of these groups is critical. Otherwise people create their own structure. You’ll see the same old people talking. You see the same ideas come up. People engage in looking for solutions that they have already had in mind and advocating them. That’s what happens to a lot of these committees. Any one of us who’s been in real organizations have seen this, and heard this, and felt it.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: This is, I know, slightly far from where we began, but you just mentioned something that I found so interesting in the book, this idea of bringing up these old solutions again and again. And I think in the book you call this the garbage can approach. It’s the kind of thing that once you know about it, you do see it everywhere and you have a name for it. So maybe since you just mentioned that, we should just dial down on this for just a second to help our listeners out and recognize this when they see it in these kinds of groups.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So one of my old professors– I shouldn’t say old, because he’s so young at heart– Jim March. But he is one of the founders along with several other researchers of the garbage can perspective. And so what he did in his research was he said, what if we take away all of these ideas that we have about decision making being a rational process, where I have particular goals, and strategies, and I’m going to come up with particular solutions in this careful, planned way. And just imagine, just as a thought experiment, that this is completely random.

And so, as you said, it’s just a big garbage can. There’s solutions floating around. And there’s problems floating around. And there’s people there who– and they’re just coming together and just like atoms kind of coming together randomly. And they get matched. And so if it matches in an interesting way, bang, we’re done we go with that. And it’s just that random. And clearly it’s an ideal type, it’s an exaggeration. But surprisingly we sometimes have these decisions in organizations. And we wonder, how did we end up in this place. And Jim March’s famous garbage can model is what helps us explain it sometimes. The work that we do, the money that we’re spending– we don’t have a clear causal model of the problem.

And so you can deploy all of these things, and it’s going to go around the problem. It’s going to go over the problem. It’s never going to hit the problem, because your causal model isn’t there. If the causal model is just spend more money and then we’ll get an outcome, you’re going to have waste.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So what might be some signs that you are macro managing even if you do have a team of good people? What should you be on the lookout for as a sign that maybe you’ve gone past empowerment to just not doing much as a manager at all?

TANYA MENON: So the signs are very telltale. And so, for example, people don’t know their roles. And so if you bring all the superstars together, there’s no supporting cast. So if people aren’t clear about who knows what and how everybody’s going to be contributing to this team, you get action with the traction. You get people doing things that they shouldn’t be doing, speaking out about areas where they don’t have expertise. So that would be one sign where people aren’t clear about their roles.

Another sign is conflict. You bring a bunch of superstars together in a room and you expect everybody to get along really well. Well, they all have big egos. And sometimes groups find themselves in really difficult situations, and they need a leader to help them work through that, to manage through that. And the most telltale and obvious sign of macro management is when you think you’ve been clear in terms of communicating what you want out of that group or that team and they come up with a completely different product than what you expected. Very likely they were floundering around for months not really knowing what to do, how to do it, and weren’t getting that direction.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: If you are someone who, then, has heard that and then said to themselves, OK, well that could be me, how could you as a manager start to turn the ship around. Because your team is probably used to a lot of freedom at this point. How can you sort of reset expectations with them or start to introduce more active management?

TANYA MENON: So I think that what you said right there it’s really hard– if you’ve given people a lot of freedom and you have to start pulling the reins back in. But that kind of thing that we’re talking about here is not necessarily what the micro manager is doing in terms of watching over people, and monitoring them, and checking up on their work. We are giving very specific recommendations in terms of how you set up teams.

So in terms of helping people see who’s the expert at what, what are the roles, what can I do, how can I contribute. Helping people figure out basic norms, basic ground rules, even having a simple conversation in terms of how are we going to get work done together as a group, how are we going to deal with conflict, when is it appropriate for us to speak out about this particular situation, and how should we disagree on particular problems. And so those kinds of questions– sometime is it’s conversation about these ground rules, basic norms, that we never did up front and we let people kind of work freely without having that in place.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What if you’re not the manager of this team but you work on the team. If your boss is a macro manager, are there some ways that you can either impose order on the team yourself or should you just go to your boss and try to have them be more involved? What should you do if you’re on the team?

TANYA MENON: Yeah, it’s a great question, because so many of us struggle with managers like this. And I’ve talked to so many of my executives and my students, and they struggle with, how do I deal with this situation. How do I deal with this person, this problem? And I think there’s a couple approaches that you can do. I think one is simply clarifying with the boss how they are thinking about the work and maybe even trying to get templates and all of these ways to impose structure on the work itself.

But the fact is there’s certain people who, they think at a very high level. They’re really not great with the details. And, in fact, they may even look down on those who are so detail-oriented. And so they’re really good at big picture. Their strength is talking high level philosophy. And so one of the things that I think is really important at this point is– you said it– which is that the order is imposed by the group itself.

And so, oftentimes, there is this structure that emerges in a group where you have a CEO-type of person, which would be the main boss who’s doing the inspiration side of it, and someone who fills the gap that’s left behind as an implementer, who’s more like a chief operations officer, someone who’s really good at the details and maybe translating for the boss so that the structure comes in place. And so that’s what happens on good groups and good teams where people can fill in these roles. But very often nothing like this happens. The structure is this amorphous thing. And if you haven’t done the work to create it, people are just going with the flow. And you don’t have that kind of a rational fix that’s put in place. But that’s what we’d hope would occur in such a situation.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, Tonya this has been a really interesting conversation. And I just wanted to thank you for spending some time with us today.

TANYA MENON: Oh, thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That was Tonya Menon, an associate professor at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. She’s the co-author with Leigh Thompson of the new book Stop Spending, Start Managing. For more, visit HBR.org. And as always, you can connect with us on Twitter @HarvardBiz or on Facebook at facebook.com/HBR.