When I talk about the 27 challenges, people often ask me, “Why are there 27 challenges, instead of 26 or 28 or some other number?”

This book is based on twenty years of workplace research conducted by my company, RainmakerThinking, Inc. We’ve asked hundreds of thousands of managers, in our management seminars, focus groups, interviews, and surveys, some version of this open-ended question: “Which employee situations are most challenging for you as a manager?” Despite the diversity of people and situations, the same basic challenges come up repeatedly. In fact, more than 90 percent of responses over the years refer to these same 27 challenges.

This book is intentionally designed to be used and reused as a reference book—a hands-on management tool you may go back to over and over again throughout your career as a leader, manager, or supervisor. As you’ll see in the table of contents, the 27 challenges are not enumerated in order of frequency or difficulty, but rather, grouped in seven chapters based on the larger themes they have in common. I encourage you to go ahead and skip right to the specific challenge you are facing today.

Once you’ve solved that problem, you may feel tempted to leave this book on your shelf until the next challenge. However, you should consider reading the whole book from beginning to end. Here’s why: It turns out that when things are going wrong in a management relationship, almost always the common denominator is unstructured, low-substance, hit-or-miss communication. And almost always the solution comes from applying the fundamentals of management. Throughout the book, you’ll see—one challenge at a time—how the most effective managers apply the fundamentals of management to gain control of any situation with a step-by-step solution to the problem at hand. So reading the whole thing from beginning to end is like putting yourself through management fundamentals boot camp. Then go ahead and put it on your shelf until you need a refresher on your next real-life challenge.

However you choose to use this book, please use it well and use it strong!