Stop Spending, Start Managing

Think about your toughest problem at work, and how it’s being tackled. Are you finding yourself stuck in endless committees and seeing money spent on consultants and analytics? With all the time and money you’re spending on the problem, have you gotten the results you want, or have your actions perhaps made the problem even worse? The most frustrating parts of work (and life) occur when we lose touch with the connection between our inputs and our outputs.

Tanya Menon will discuss her new book with Leigh Thompson which addresses five critical ways we get trapped in problem solving: we use past solutions for today’s problems; we’re too agreeable so we avoid conflicts; we’re in our narrow cliques and miss the whole picture, competitive processes stop us from executing solutions; and we engage in macromanagement (i.e.under-managing groups). We’ll talk about some key ways to catch ourselves in these traps, and get to the heart of the problem.