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W
e’ve all been warned not to over-
manage – become a hen-pecking,
micro-manager, obsessing about de-
tails, instead of delegating wisely.
But consultant Bruce Tulgan believes the opposite,
under-management, is epidemic. Indeed, he insists
it’s hiding in plain sight, but we don’t notice.
“It is so often what’s going wrong in so many
workplaces. It is rampant. It is costly. It’s very easy
to treat, but it is very hard to cure. The medicine
is strong, so when you feel better it’s tempting to
water it down. But as soon as you stop taking the
strong medicine, you start to get sick again,” he
writes in
The 27 Challenges Managers Face.
A test about how prominent it is in your work-
place is to ask whether you or your colleagues are
often in firefighting mode, responding to threaten-
ing events and getting everything running smooth-
ly again before the next spontaneous eruption.
Most of those fires can be prevented in advance, he
contends, by properly practising the fundamentals
of management, holding regular check-ins with
staff to understand what’s happening and to keep
them on track. That’s the stiff medicine you need
to take.
“What’s amazing is that so few managers in the
real world consistently practise the fundamentals
very well. What’s even more amazing is that so
many managers think they are doing it, when they
are not,” he observes.
Before we get to the fundamentals, let’s look
at how he says you are likely spending your day:
Caught up in four pernicious time drains. First, you
attend too many mediocre group meetings. Second,
you wade through a never-ending tidal wave of
email. Third, you are interrupting others and be-
ing interrupted, making concentration and focus
for you and your colleagues difficult. Finally, you
touch base lightly with direct reports, checking in
and shooting the breeze. “How are you?” “How’s
everything going?” “Is everything on track?” “Are
there any problems I should know about?” Those
are open-ended questions, designed to keep you
plugged in, but in fact they prove to be gestures,
because the responses are generally vague, limp
or avoided. You end up shooting the breeze rather
than tackling anything substantive.
Managers try to manage performance through
annual performance reviews, but those invariably
are unsuccessful as they aren’t immediate and we
shy away from confrontation. In recent years, there
have been a multitude of calls to manage perfor-
mance on the run, in the heat of the action – every
day, or week, as event crop up. But instead, we ask
puffball questions. “How are you?” “How’s every-
thing going?” “Is everything on track?” “Are there
any problems I should know about?”
He prescribes highly structured and highly
substantive check-ins – perhaps once a day or at
least every few days, depending on the situation.
You need to make expectations clear; track per-
formance and provide ongoing, candid feedback;
and recognize and reward when performance war-
rants. Through that rigorous approach – the strong
medicine to counter undermanagement – account-
ability becomes a process rather than a slogan.
Let’s start with highly-structured. Set aside an
hour a day for your one-on-ones, concentrating
on three or four subordinates. In an ideal world,
he says you would talk to every direct report every
day but that’s probably impossible so you will have
to make choices. Don’t reject his conversational ap-
proach because you lack the time – you’re trapped
in those four pernicious time drains. This is some-
thing you must do, and if it results in fewer fires to
beat back as he believes, that will grant you more
The Leader’s Bookshelf
Harvey Schachter
Are you an Undermanager?
The 27
Challenges
Managers Face
By Bruce Tulgan
Jossey-Bass, 242
pages, $34.00
26
/ Canadian Government Executive
// February 2016
Management is undermined
by pernicious time drains:
-mediocre group meetings
-the tidal wave of email
-constant interruptions
-insignificant bi-lateral
meetings with reports