But you’ve zeroed in on another issue. The tendency to let the urgent drive the important out the door, into the parking lot, and over the hill. It’s something of a management plague these days. You highlight good examples.

There’s another one that I’ve encountered in working with supervisors. It’s applying RFA to documentation. Spot something wrong, reach for the word process and start to document. But as I’ve stressed in the Working Supervisor’s Support Kit and elsewhere, that’s usually not effective.

It’s usually better to let your team member know what you’ve noticed and that you will be watching for similar behavior and documenting it. I’ve found that most of the time, for most team members, that’s all that’s needed to achieve correction without the need for either paperwork or a team member feeling blindsided. As one of my class participants observed, “Most good supervision happens in the cracks in the system.”

Good management, best I can tell, addresses both momentary outcomes (the smoke/fire) and durable processes (the fireproofing).

Both, always, at the same time.

But that’s hard. Which is why we see mediocre-to-bad managers and management teams *talk* about process while actually reacting (more or less badly) to momentary outcomes.