Macromanagement Is Just as Bad as Micromanagement

Legal teams face more data and more scrutiny than ever. They need AI built for both. Relativity is the AI platform for legal work, delivering defensible AI that handles the tedious tasks so judgment stays where it belongs with you. Learn more at relativity.com/ideacast.

Marketers know how it feels to invest in something that seemed incredible but didn't live up to the hype. We optimize for impressions but then don't see any revenue. Instead, get the highest ROAS of all major ad networks with LinkedIn Ads. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Just go to linkedin.com/ideacast. Terms and conditions apply.

On May 20th, join me at HBR's annual Leadership Summit with masterclasses, interviews with the CEOs of AT&T and Mattel, and an interactive case discussion led by Harvard Business School Professor Karim Lakhani. For 25% off, be sure to grab your early bird ticket by April 14. To learn more, go to hbr.org/leadershipsummit. See you there.

Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Greene for Michael. I'm talking today with Tonya Mannon, 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. Tonya, thank you so much for talking with us.

Thank you so much, Sarah. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Yeah, me too. Me too. I wanted to just dive in and start talking about some of the traps that you describe 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 macro-management, and I thought it would make sense to start there because we've heard so much about micro-management. But what's macro-management?

Yeah, so when we talked in this book about macro-management, I guess it's a catchy term and all of that. But what we were very interested in is that maybe it's for cultural reasons, we have very much overemphasized micromanagement, and micromanagement, 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, right? 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 macromanagement trap. And the macromanagement 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 had 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.

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 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.

This is exactly the place where we start our chapter on macromanagement from. And so with this particular idea, it sounds great, right? All you do is the interview, hire the right people, and you're done, right? 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 is going to be great. And what we end up starting this chapter with is a few stories about what they call supergroups, and supergroups 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 teams, right, the dream team Olympic teams, The NBA, All-Star, Olympic team, yeah. 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. 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 kind of where we start with, and the answers are really predictable as, as well.

What ends up happening?

What we talk about in the book is just usual, same old disorganized committee. And these are so understructured. There's not a single individual oftentimes who's setting up norms, setting up roles. There may be too many people. I, I mean, I've been 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. And so we look at all of these ways. 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, it's like you bring together a whole bunch of musical instruments and say, "Now play." You're going to get noise, you are going to get chaos, it is going to be cacophonous. And that is 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 have 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 a lot these committees, any one of us who's been in real organizations has seen this and heard this and felt it.

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 sort of recognize this when they see it in these kinds of groups.

So one of my old professors, I shouldn't say old because he is so young at heart, and smart, 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 is he said, what if we take away all of these ideas 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 start 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 are spending, we don't have a clear causal model of the problem. And so you can deploy all of these things and it is going to go around the problem. It is going to go over the problem. It is never going to hit the problem because your causal model isn't there. If the causal model is to spend more money and then we'll get an outcome, you're going to have waste.

Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling, optimizing for impressions and then not seeing revenue. Instead, invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Just go to linkedin.com/ideacast. Terms and conditions apply.

So what might be some signs that you are micromanaging, 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?

So, 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 is going to be contributing to this team, you get action without 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.

If you are someone who then has heard that and then said to themselves, okay, 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?

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 the kind of thing that we're talking about here is not necessarily what the micromanager is doing in terms of watching over people and monitoring them and checking up on their work. 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 How would we disagree on particular problems? And so those kinds of questions, sometimes it's conversation about these ground rules, basic norms that we never did upfront and we let people kind of work freely without having that in place.

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 kind of try to have them be more involved? What should you do if you're on the team?

Yeah, it's a really, 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 are 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 kind kind of 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 is kind of doing the inspiration side of it, and someone who fills the gap that is left behind as an implementer who is more like a Chief Operations Officer processor, someone who is more of 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 kind of this amorphous thing, and if you haven't done the work to create it, people are just kind of going with the flow. 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.

Well, Tanya, this has been a really interesting conversation, and I just wanted to thank you for spending some time with us today.

Oh, thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

That was Tanya Menon, an associate professor at Ohio State University's Fisher College of of Business. She's the co-author with Lee 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.