This is Steva Robbins. Welcome to the Get It Done Guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

I remember my first management job. It was hell. There I was, surrounded by employees, looking to me for direction, even though I didn't have a clue what I was doing.

Fire and brimstone everywhere and nothing but a barbed

whip and a pool of boiling lava to keep them on the straight and narrow. It was just hell.

Fortunately, after a while, you learn. It turns out that a big piece of a manager's job

isn't flogging employees with a barbed whip. Indeed, it's simply giving employees the direction

they need without using a barbed whip

or lowering them into boiling lava. In companies larger than a few people, there's enough work to be

done and the work is so specialized that it's really easy for people to get out of sick. I mean,

if Europa is handling the construction of the holding pens for the carnivorous Audrey II plants,

and Melvin is actually handling the

transportation of the plants. They each know only the details of their own project.

If Melvin arranges for the Audrey twos to arrive a week before the restraining barriers are

in place, things could get messy. Something needs to keep Melvin and Europa in sync.

That is where bosses come in. Even though

we're taught to think of a boss as someone who gives orders, most bosses are really pretty

bad at being good at giving orders. The place a boss can really add value, though, is in

coordinating and making sure that everyone is doing what they need to do at the right time,

so the company moves forward like a well-oiled machine. So now, instead of

everyone coordinating with everyone, they only need to coordinate with the boss. It's the boss

who coordinates between people. Whether you're a boss who wants to coordinate with your people,

or a people who wants to coordinate with your boss, or both, you can use a brief five-minute

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