I only made it 3/4 through this, but this seems like paint-by-numbers advice, and lacks the real-world flavour that make "following a textbook" in these cases <

I only made it 3/4 through this, but this seems like paint-by-numbers advice, and lacks the real-world flavour that make "following a textbook" in these cases <actually hard>. Feedback needs to be immediate. As soon as someone steps off the path or veers into dangerous territory, let them know. Ideally during the first 90 days, give people “an exorbitant amount of feedback,” Lopp says. “Just think, you could have fixed it six or nine months earlier by pulling Jeff aside and saying, hey you really frustrated people in that last meeting because you weren’t listening.” People that are being "jerks" are typically not leaving obvious footprints when they "step off the path" nor do they tend to make obvious and transparent mistakes or mis-steps in pubic. You are typically dealting with people well versed in passive agression. Plausibly deniability, and adding unwanted "drama" by abusing their authority, or bullying their staff or doing a whole range of things which if the junior staff report to (skip-level) management, they (not the mid-level-manager) will be on the hook for "insubordination" to the business discretion of the middle boss. This is the type of opaque, catch-22 that many people face in reality and dealing with it is a PITA, time consuming and risky (for senior and junior staff). Its not a paint-by-numbers situation at all, those are ovbious and people with blatant incompetence tend to not make past interviews. The types of problems that tend to result after effective interviewing are rightly seens as variations of incompetence, and bad leadership though... because they impair the ability to "get shit done". But dealing with them requires more than a nudge on the tiller when something is headed off course. It requires (1) a system and approach to make performance transparent; (2) a system to compartmentalize risk; and (3) a system that generates enough observations to for reliable systemic data on performance and accountability. Without such a struture in place in these fronts, "bad apples" will underperform without consequence for long periods of time, because they will cover their tracks, blend in, and otherwise obfuscate situations to manipulative effect. If all this seems "overly complicated" and not anything like following an HR handbook, that's probably about par for the course !!