The more you start committing to strong back to basics management, the more clear and focused your management challenge will become.

The more you engage, the more clearly you'll understand the nuances of your day to day management challenge, so you can fine-tune and adjust your approach.

Over time, you will have a better and better idea of who is doing what, where, why, when, and how. You've gotten over the surprises. You've done a lot of adjusting. Your meetings with each person will start to feel like standard operating procedure. If you've been monitoring, measuring, and documenting each person's performance in your tracking system, then you will have accumulated a written record of patterns for each person.

Once you've had a chance to digest what's going on and given your new management style a chance to work its wonders (usually six weeks or so is enough time to start to see some big results), well then you will naturally get to a point where some decisions are obvious: You need to fire this one guy. You need to make sure you don't lose this other guy. You need to shift around certain tasks and responsibilities from one person to another. And you should probably meet more often with one employee, but you only need to meet with this other employee once a week.

You will start to make these decisions because they will start to become obvious and you have to trust the process. Take action. Don't slow down. Don't get stuck. Stay flexible. Be prepared to revise and adjust every step of the way as circumstances change, as people change. You have to keep meeting regularly with every person. Stick to the basics, trust the process. Continue to revisit your documentation. Keep asking yourself:
- Who needs to be managed more closely? Who needs a little more space?
- Who is likely to improve? Who is not?
- Who should be developed? Who should be fired?
- Who are your best people? Who are your real performance problems?
- Who requires special accommodations and rewards? Who deserves them?

Remember, people change. Circumstances change. As you stay tuned in to the dynamic situation of the real world, you have to keep revising and adjusting your approach every step of the way.

BONUS MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICE
Who are your real performance problems? List them. For each one, decide on at least one concrete action for helping this person improve. Does the person need more direction? Does the person need a new role? Does the person need more training? Does the person need more encouragement or some other form of motivation?

And who are your best people? List them. For each one, decide on at least one concrete action for recognizing and rewarding this person.