Tanya Menon
Organisations claim they want diverse teams and original thinking, yet the networks inside them keep producing the same conversations with the same people. Hiring loops recycle, ideas stall, and inclusion stays at the level of statement rather than practice. The friction is not values. It is the structure of who talks to whom.
Tanya Menon is a Stanford-trained organisational psychologist at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business who helps companies see how networks, hiring decisions, and everyday habits shape innovation, inclusion, and team performance.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Tanya Menon
- A research voice on inclusion that starts with network structure, hiring data, and decision bias rather than identity language, useful for leadership teams that need substance under a contested topic.
- Tenured academic credibility: Stanford PhD, Fisher College professorship, Associate Editor at Management Science, a decade teaching Power and Influence at Chicago Booth.
- Co-author of Stop Spending, Start Managing (Harvard Business Review Press), which names five specific organisational traps including expertise lock-in and conflict avoidance, applied directly to senior team behaviour.
- A TED Talk with 1.8 million-plus views that translates weak-tie network research into a behaviour senior leaders and their teams can immediately recognise in themselves.
- Equally fluent on team performance, persuasion, and hiring, which makes her a credible single speaker across an HR or culture programme rather than one topic in a series.
Biography highlights
- Professor of Management and Human Resources, Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University.
- PhD, Stanford Graduate School of Business; BA, Harvard University.
- Associate Editor, Management Science.
- Co-author, Stop Spending, Start Managing: Strategies to Transform Wasteful Habits, Harvard Business Review Press.
- TED Talk listed among TED.com’s most popular of 2018, with over 1.8 million views.
- Faculty for over a decade at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, teaching Power and Influence.
- Research cited in The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Guardian, The Times of London, Chicago Tribune, and Boston Globe.
Biography
Most senior teams know who they talk to every day. Far fewer can name who they have stopped talking to, and what that has cost the organisation. Tanya Menon’s research starts in that gap. Her work at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business, supported by a Stanford PhD and a decade teaching at Chicago Booth, focuses on how relationships at work shape decisions, hiring, and innovation.
Her TED Talk, “The secret to great opportunities? The person you haven’t met yet,” reframes networking as a structural problem rather than a personal one. Drawing on Mark Granovetter’s classic work on weak ties, she shows why the routines that feel efficient inside an organisation quietly narrow the people, ideas, and candidates a leader ever encounters. Over 1.8 million people have watched it.
With Leigh Thompson of Kellogg, she wrote Stop Spending, Start Managing for Harvard Business Review Press. The book identifies five concrete traps, including the Expertise Trap, the Winner’s Trap, and the Agreement Trap, that explain why competent teams burn time and money on the wrong problems. It is built for leaders who run real teams, not for a general management audience.
She has been an Associate Editor at Management Science, and her research has been cited by The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Guardian, The Times of London, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe. The through-line is a usable diagnostic vocabulary for the parts of organisational life that look like soft skills until they start producing hard losses.
Key speaking topics
- Networks and weak ties at work
- Inclusion through hiring and network design
- Team decision-making and productive conflict
- Power, persuasion, and influence
- Innovation and pattern-breaking
- Wasteful organisational habits and managerial traps
- AI and human decision-making in hiring
Ideal for
- CHROs and Heads of Talent rethinking hiring pipelines and selection bias.
- Heads of DEI and culture leaders looking for a research-led, non-ideological frame for inclusion.
- Senior leadership teams under pressure to improve cross-functional collaboration.
- Learning and development leads designing executive programmes on influence, networks, and team performance.
Audience outcomes
- A working vocabulary for the network and hiring habits that quietly limit inclusion and innovation.
- Five named organisational traps senior teams can test their own behaviour against.
- A research-grounded view of weak ties as a hiring, learning, and idea-generation lever.
- Specific tactics for breaking routine social patterns inside large organisations.
- A more defensible inclusion narrative grounded in network structure and decision data.
Talks
A research-led talk on why the routines of working life shrink networks and how leaders and teams can engineer the weak ties that drive innovation, hiring quality, and inclusion.
Key takeaways:
- Why weak ties, not strong ones, deliver most career and organisational opportunities.
- How daily routines inside organisations narrow exposure to new people and ideas.
- Specific behaviour changes that broaden professional networks without rebranding them as networking.
A diagnostic walk through the five traps Menon and Leigh Thompson identified as the most expensive habits in modern management, with implications for senior team behaviour.
Key takeaways:
- The Expertise, Winner’s, Agreement, Communication, and Macromanagement traps as named patterns.
- How conflict avoidance and over-communication generate hidden cost in senior teams.
- Practical reframes for leaders running fatigued or change-saturated organisations.
A research-based session on de-biasing hiring decisions and widening candidate pools, drawing on her work on networks, decision-making, and inclusion.
Key takeaways:
- Why structured hiring beats intuition on both speed and fairness.
- How network homophily quietly shapes the candidate slate before any decision is made.
- Where AI helps and where it amplifies existing bias in selection.