You have a complex problem at work, and you know the standard solutions: hire a consultant, enlist a superstar employee, have more meetings about it. In short, spend money and hours to dig your way out. But you've been down this road before-the so-called solution consumes your time, dollars, and resources, and yet the problem still reappears.
There is a way out of this cycle. Organizational researchers Tanya Menon and Leigh Thompson, experts in collaboration and creativity, identify five spending traps that lead to this wasteful "action without traction":
The Expertise Trap: recycling old solutions on current problems The Winner's Trap: investing additional resources into failing projects The Agreement Trap: avoiding conflict to feel like a team player The Communication Trap: communicating too frequently over too many channels The Macromanagement Trap: assuming your employees don't need your direction
Menon and Thompson combine their own research with other findings in psychology to provide strategies to break these unproductive habits and refine your skills as a manager. From shaping problems in new ways and learning from failure through experimentation, to stimulating productive conflict and structuring coordinated conversations, you can escape these traps and discover the value hidden in your organization-without spending a dime.
"Stop Spending, Start Managing explores the universal pitfalls managers face and provides practical strategies for enhancing individual and team performance. The ideas in this book are easily transferable to different situations and focus on harnessing the power of multiple perspectives."
Matt Ferguson, CEO, CareerBuilder
"This deftly written, highly readable book helps unlock one of the most important issues facing business today: how do you shift unproductive, wasteful behavior inside an organization? It teaches managers to change their mind-sets and thus save time and money and unlock hidden value within their companies."
Gurcharan Das, author, The Difficulty of Being Good; former CEO, Procter & Gamble India
"Every manager will recognize something of themselves in the traits Tanya Menon and Leigh Thompson describe in Stop Spending, Start Managing. Their solutions and advice provide helpful routes out of the habits and behaviors we've all fallen into so that we can start to manage smarter and more productively."
Joanne Segars, Chief Executive, Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association
