The management style Adam Grant says more leaders should avoid

Today we’re returning to a management topic that organizational psychologist Adam Grant and I discussed earlier this month: how to better train managers to oversee roles that didn’t exist just a few years ago.

If you haven’t caught on, this is a bit of an obsession of mine. As companies face new challenges and new risks, they’re, in turn, creating new jobs to address those issues. Take the head of remote work, for instance, a now-popular role designed to smooth the transition to hybrid work. The proliferation of new functions has made it increasingly common for managers to be in charge of operations and tasks they have never performed. It’s a unique position that calls for intentional management training and support, says Grant, who warns that falling back on traditional management would be a mistake. 

Grant argues that the old form of leadership encourages more “management by walking around,” which makes “employees feel monitored and micromanaged.”

He encourages leaders to instead look at the management research of his late colleague Sigal Barsade. Barsade, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, is known for her preeminent research on the role of emotions in the workplace, organizational behavior, change, and leadership. Grant says her research on what she called “leading by doing,” is one of the most compelling alternatives to “management by walking around.” 

“Managers end up intervening with bad solutions to problems they don’t fully understand, and what Sigal wrote about was the idea that leaders and managers ought to spend 5% to 10% of their time doing the actual work of the people who report to them,” says Grant. 

As leaders gain responsibility, workers are more likely to feel disconnected from them, Barsade and University of Sydney associate professor Stefan Meisiek wrote in their book Next Generation Business Handbook: New Strategies from Tomorrow’s Thought Leaders. They refer to this as “psychological distance.”

Leading by doing takes managers off a pedestal and decreases the aforementioned distance, Grant explains. It also allows leaders to understand the work of their direct reports more thoroughly and absorb new skills, which helps them better manage and teach. In practice, it looks like assisting with employee projects and their daily routines, and it’s a shift from manager-managed to that of a respected colleague, according to Barsade and Meisiek. 

“It also allows [managers] to build real connections and earn trust with their teams,” Grant says. “Now is the time for that. If you’re managing people who are doing work that you don’t understand, your first responsibility is to learn how to do that work and make it part of your job.”

Amber Burton
amber.burton@fortune.com
@amberbburton

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Erika H. James, dean of Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania, spoke with Fortune’s Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt about her new book The Prepared Leader. She shared the most common mistakes leaders make during periods of crisis, and no surprise it all comes back to developing people.

“I don’t think we are investing enough in our people so that when something does happen—when we are confronted with a crisis, for example—we don’t know necessarily where to turn or where the expertise lies. We may assume it because people hold a particular title, but one of the things that we find over and over again is that crises bring out the essence of people, either at their best or at their worst. And if we know some of that in advance, we’ll know exactly who to tap when we are up against the wall and we’re really confronted with something threatening.”

Around the Table

- Legacy tech companies like Amazon, Meta, and Google have paused hiring and other expenditures as they wait to see what will happen with the economy. Insider 

- Workers at an Amazon warehouse near Albany, N.Y., voted against forming a union. NPR

- Apple faces a growing unionization movement at its stores in Australia, inspired by similar efforts in the U.S. New York Times

- Companies in a U.K. pilot program for a four-day workweek saw applications for open roles go up as high as 60%, according to one participant. CNBC

- Remote work saved Americans an estimated 60 million hours commuting, most of which they spent sleeping, according to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Bloomberg

Watercooler

Everything you need to know from Fortune. 

Microsoft layoffs. Microsoft laid off about 1,000 employees on Monday. It's the latest example of cost-cutting from tech companies as they brace for a potential recession. —Christiaan Hetzner

HR to CFO. More chief HR heads are making the pivot to purely business operations roles. Kate Burke started her tenure in the C-suite as AllianceBernstein's chief talent officer, where she learned how to invest in human capital and align talent to organizational priorities. She's now CFO. —Sheryl Estrada

Measuring ESG. Sanda Ojiambo, CEO of the UN Global Compact and one of the inventors of ESG goals, says it’s time to reevaluate the reporting metrics used to track their progress. —Sanda Ojiambo

Broken rung. The leadership hurdles for women start at the beginning of their careers. For every 100 men promoted from entry-level to management roles, just 87 women get the same early career opportunity, according to a McKinsey survey. —Emma Hinchcliffe, Paige McGlauflin