Get the Basics Right

One of the primary responsibilities of a manager is to ensure that each employee can do the basics of his or her job well. In other words, a manager will require that each employee is – first and foremost – competent in their specific role. This might seem elementary – even to the point of insulting your intelligence – but you would be surprised at how frequently an employee really can’t perform the basics requirements of a given job very well!

There are a number of reasons for this, including poor or non-existent training, inadequate employee orientation, misunderstanding of job requirements, and a lack of accountability. The good news is that each of these reasons can be influenced and remedied by you, the manager.

In his autobiography It Doesn’t Take a Hero, General Norman Schwarzkopf recounts a number of his experiences as a colonel in Vietnam. In one particularly instructive story, he describes this encounter with a group of soldiers who did not do the basics of their job well – despite constant contact with the enemy:

Nothing was camouflaged…the guy who guided us in to land wore a pair of bright red shorts, flip-flops, and a yellow bandanna around his head, and had a three-day growth of beard. I jumped off and walked over to a lieutenant standing nearby – he had no helmet and no weapon, even though this was supposedly enemy territory…

“The captain came back – still wearing no helmet. “Sir, I don’t have one,” he explained…

“Do you have security posted around your perimeter?”

“Uh…yes, sir.”

“Okay, take me to it.” We started walking into the bushes. As we moved further and further out, the captain was calling, “Security? Security?” After a couple of hundred yards, I said disgustedly, “We’re wasting our time. Let’s go back and ask your platoon leaders where security is…”

The bottom line was that they had no security. The enemy could have strolled in, opened fire, and killed dozens of men. We retraced our steps and I inspected the camp itself. I walked up to a machine gunner whose weapon had no bullets in it and was coated with rust. When I asked why the gun wasn’t loaded he hung his head and explained that his ammunition was in his rucksack. I wasn’t angry with him – it was his sergeant who was responsible – but I said, “Okay, soldier. Let’s do a simulation. You’re under attack. Get your ammunition.” The guy scrambled over to his rucksack and turned it upside down. Out tumbled a portable radio, cans of food, books, and a hopeless tangle of ammunition belts, all rusty and caked with the crumbs of cookies from home.

I knew I had to put an end to this carelessness before men started dying.

(Excerpted from It Doesn’t Take a Hero, Bantam (1992), pages 153-155)

It is difficult to believe that a group of soldiers in harm’s way could be so cavalier about their protection -the most basic of a soldier’s responsibilities – but it is even more implausible to believe that the officers in charge would allow conditions to deteriorate to the point described above.

As you might predict, the outgoing battalion commander blamed everyone but himself:

I was expecting a two- or three-hour discussion of the battalion, its officers, its NCOs, its mission, but he only said, “Well, I hope you do better than I did. I tried to lead as best I could, but this is a lousy battalion. It’s got lousy morale. It’s got a lousy mission. Good luck to you.” With that he shook my hand and walked out.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to build an environment of accountability if the individual employees are not first aware of the requirements and expectations of the job. Accountability begins first with the manager! Once performance standards and appropriate metrics are put into place, then – and only then – can anyone be held accountable to performance.

If your team is “lousy”, don’t blame them – blame yourself. Then start becoming a leader. Start with the basics, and make sure your team is proficient in the requirements of their jobs.