Chapter One
The Fundamentals Are All You Need

You walk into your weekly team meeting expecting the standard updates around the table. Some people are more prepared than others. Not enough information from some, too much from others. Digressions. Side conversations. Devices. One hour turns into two.

You sometimes think: “Why do we even have these team meetings?” After all, everyone touches base with everybody on the team almost daily. There is an open door policy. If something comes up, you let each other know as needed. You talk and email with each other all day long.

Nonetheless, the meeting begins as usual. Until it quickly surfaces that very important Project Q is off track and behind schedule. How could this be? You’ve been checking in with everybody regularly, one-on-one, on top of the weekly team meeting.

It’s not clear what happened. Maybe there was a change in specifications that wasn’t fully communicated. Perhaps a resource constraint got in the way, a technology glitch, or human error? Somebody must have dropped the ball—internally or externally. Is there anyone who can be held accountable? Mr. Red has dropped the ball before.

There are a lot of moving parts with Project Q. Now changes must be made throughout, changes that will require rework by counterparts in another group in another department. They will not be happy.

Time, resources, energy, and money have been wasted. There is blaming, complaining, explaining. Everything has been harder since the team recently lost its most valuable player, Ms. Platinum. And her replacement, Ms. Bronze, is still not fully up to speed.

You spring into action, and the firefighting ensues. You have a series of one-on-one huddles with the team members you know you can count on in a jam. You take over some responsibilities yourself—including begging the counterparts in the other groups in the other departments to redo their parts. There are some quick stand-up meetings and long hours of heavy lifting. The crisis is handled, and Project Q is back on track.

When you figure out exactly what happened, there will probably be some very difficult conversations, and there will be consequences. Some people might lose their jobs. Even if Mr. Red is not to blame, it’s about time you really spoke to Mr. Red about his stubbornly inconsistent performance.

Once you finally get everything back on track, you are way behind on your other responsibilities. So are your employees. But things are mostly back to normal.

You touch base with everybody almost daily. They know your door is always open. If something comes up, you let each other know as needed. You talk and email with each other all day long. In any event, you will catch up with everyone in the next team meeting.

Any manager will tell you: firefighting is part of the job. It’s very hard to break the cycle, because when there is an urgent problem, it simply must be addressed. Things do go wrong—fires occur. If you are the manager, you are in charge. You lead the fight. Everybody has to grab a bucket and help fight the fire. But it’s usually difficult, time-consuming work. By the time you are done, you are way behind on all of the other work you were supposed to be doing.

Many managers have asked themselves this question: How do I make any real progress when there are so many fires to put out?

The question you should be asking is this: How many of the most frequently occurring “fires” can be prevented altogether or largely avoided, or have their impact substantially mitigated? In advance? Way in advance? And every step of the way?

The answer is most of them.

How? By consistently practicing the fundamentals, very well. That means maintaining an ongoing schedule of high-quality one-on-one dialogues with every single person you manage. High-quality means highly structured and highly substantive: ongoing, regular, scheduled, frequent, with a clear execution focus, specific to the individual, and two-way conversation. These are not the so-called “crucial conversations” when things go wrong, but regular check-ins when everything is going great, or not so great, or even just average. This insight is based on twenty years of in-depth research on supervisory relationships in the workplace. What’s amazing is that so few managers in the real world consistently practice the fundamentals very well. What’s even more amazing is that so many managers think they are already doing it, when they are not.

Look at the manager of Project Q, just described. At first glance, he appears to be attending reasonably well to the fundamentals of management 101: Holding regular team meetings, touching base with his employees almost daily, open door policy, and ongoing visibility by email and telephone.

That’s what makes this problem so complicated: the manager is following the right steps—going through the right motions. What else could he be doing? And if you had asked him just before Project Q fell apart, he probably would have said, “Everything is going just fine.”

The manager in this story is like the vast majority of managers at all levels in organizations of all shapes and sizes. This manager is communicating with his direct reports plenty. Just not very well. Not only that, because he is communicating plenty, he is lulled into a false sense of security.

In fact, if this manager is like the vast majority, it is quite likely that the manager’s communication is mostly ad hoc, hit or miss, surface level, and often pro forma. I call this “managing on autopilot.”

The vast majority of managers do their “managing” more or less on autopilot until something goes wrong—and something always does. Then communication becomes more heated and urgent—sometimes even more accurate and effective. Managers almost always get most thoroughly involved when there are problems to address—large, medium, or small—what I’ve been referring to here as “firefighting.”

Most managers think, “Everything is going just fine. It’s just that we have a lot of fires to put out, and that makes it very hard to get into a good routine. Whenever you get into a good routine, pretty soon there is another fire.” What they don’t realize is that they are stuck in a vicious cycle:

Managing on autopilot → False sense of security → Small problems have time to fester and grow → Problems inevitably blow up → Manager (and others) pulled into firefighting mode → Things get “back to normal,” managing on autopilot.

How do you break the cycle?

In nearly every one of the thousands of cases I’ve studied, the solution is simple. Not easy. But simple. What’s missing is almost always the fundamentals.

At RainmakerThinking, our research shows that very few (roughly one out of ten) managers are acing it. Too many are failing. The vast majority go through the motions, but not very well. This is what I call “undermanagement.”

I’ve written extensively on the “undermanagement epidemic”—the widespread failure of leaders, managers, and supervisors to consistently practice Management 101 with excellence. For years, my focus has been on figuring out why. Why don’t managers consistently practice the fundamentals with excellence?

Here’s the thing: Most managers are trying. Most managers communicate plenty. And on the surface it often looks like they are practicing the fundamentals of Management 101. But in the vast majority of cases their management communication is severely lacking in both structure and substance. So the motions they are going through don’t accomplish very much. And they don’t realize it.

Practicing Management 101—just the fundamentals—requires discipline and rigor. It’s not easy to maintain a high-structure, high-substance, ongoing one-on-one dialogue with every person you manage. Nonetheless, those are the fundamentals. If you are not doing that, how can you say in any meaningful way that you are “managing” someone?

If you are somebody’s manager, then you have power over that person’s livelihood and career, their ability to add value, and their ability to earn—this is how people put food on their table. They are working to make a living and take care of themselves and their families. And you are that person’s boss. That is a profound responsibility. The least you can do is the fundamentals.

If the fundamentals are not working for you, then it is almost surely the case that you are not doing them right. The fundamentals are all you need. It’s just that Management 101 is a more complex and difficult art than most people realize.

The Undermanagement Epidemic: Revisited

I’ve been conducting in-depth workplace research since 1993. Back then I was a frustrated young lawyer investigating the work attitudes of Generation X (those born between 1965 and 1977). That led to my first book, Managing Generation X, and quickly morphed into a career doing custom workplace research, consulting, and management training. From then on I’ve had a front-row seat from which to study workplace dynamics. I’ve spent most of my time interviewing, advising, and training managers at all levels: tens of thousands of managers, from CEOs to frontline supervisors, in just about every industry—retail, health care, research, finance, aerospace, software, manufacturing, the...