Basic concepts in every field are ignored by the masses who know better. That's why athletes often talk about returning to the basics. Quite often, in our attempt to succeed, we ignore the obvious steps required for success. Quite often? My mistake. More often than not is more accurate. Almost always is even a better qualifier.

In fact, I've often given orders to my subordinates that only two weeks later go completely ignored. I told one employee that he had to attend an English as a second language course, only to fire him two weeks later when he skipped his first class. His excuse was that he believed his English was just fine, when only two weeks earlier he had agreed that improving his English and attending this course was a requirement to his continued employment. Two months later he was back in Korea as the job market had turned.

Another person agreed to take anger management courses as a continuing factor in our relationship. I even researched local organizations with seminars for them. Two months later, anger was still an issue and they never took any steps to attend any anger management classes or sessions. They simply forgot about it when nobody reminded then the next day or week.

Nobody's perfect and we all have our problems. The biggest problem is that we don't execute on small stuff that would make our lives easier.

You have two employees. One works his ass off, is overworked and gets all his work done. The other is lazy and always late delivering bad work. You have a big new project that you must assign. What do you do?

Most managers will simply assign the task to the already overworked star. Then they'll get upset when the task fails to be delivered on time or with quality. The star employee will quit in frustration and the manager will be left with guess who?

Correct Answer: You fire yourself for putting your team in this position in the first place. You're the manager. You should be managing these people. If an employee is overworked, then you can't assign important work to him because he's already overworked. You should have pro-actively worked with the lesser employee before he became useless. If he didn't improve immediately, then put him on probation, track his progress and fire him if need be.

When asked, most managers will deny they do the former. Ya right! Been there too many times.