You show up at work one day and much of your job seems to be coming unglued: You have a voicemail from your manager telling you the project you worked so hard on for the last two weeks is all wrong.

You think to yourself, “Well, I told you I didn’t have enough experience to take that task on!” Then you receive an email from a manager in another department, who is hounding you about “taking way too long” with yet another project—you need to get that to her “immediately.”

Meanwhile, you were planning on spending the morning finishing up one of your routine tasks—dotting some ‘I’s and crossing a few “t”s—but you received so many urgent emails, you figure you better answer them before you do anything else.

Last week, the same scenario played out and you forgot to go back and dot the “I”s and cross the “t”s; in the end, the task had to be redone at the last minute. You ended up working very late that day and everybody was mad. You don’t want to do that again, so you’ve been trying to lay to stay out of everybody’s way. But now you have these managers messing with your day before it even starts!

What’s going on? You think of yourself as a high performer. But you start second-guessing yourself: “One manager tells me to do one thing. Another one tells me to do something totally different.

How am I supposed to know what takes priority? How am I supposed to know what is up to me and what’s not? The bosses here don’t have any idea how to manage!

Only the rarest of them ever spends enough time with me to give me the guidance I need or to make sure I have the resources to do the job, or to help me problem-solve. Half the time, I don’t get any recognition for the work I do well, no matter how hard I work.”

If this is anything like your situation at work, either now or sometime in the recent past, then you are not alone!

What’s going on here?

It is tempting to look at the scenario described above and blame the managers or blame the entire enterprise. Maybe this company has a disproportionate number of managers who are true jerks… but probably not. It is more likely that the problem is hiding in plain sight: Undermanagement.

In organizations across all industries and at all levels of organizations, there is a shocking and profound epidemic of what I call “undermanagement”—the opposite of micromanagement: The vast majority of supervisory relationships between employees and their bosses lack the day-to-day engagement necessary to consistently maintain the very basics of management: clear expectations; necessary resources; real performance tracking; and fair credit and reward.

In fact, most employees report that they feel disengaged from their immediate boss(es); that two-way communication is sorely deficient; and that employees rarely get the daily guidance, resources, feedback and reward that they need.

Undermanagement is not a household word like micromanagement, yet it should be! Undermanagement is a success-crushing syndrome worth fight against. Indeed, the consequences of undermanagement make the impact of micromanagement look like nothing:

• Unnecessary problems occur.
• Small problems (that could have been solved easily) turn into big problems
• Resources are squandered
• Employees perform tasks/responsibilities the wrong way for longer periods of time
• Low performers hang around causing problems for everyone else (and collecting the same paycheck as everyone else too!)
• High performers get frustrated, lose commitment, and think about leaving
• Employees are not set-up to perform at their best
• Managers spend their management time in all the wrong ways

You may not be aware of undermanagement in your workplace. But look around you. I bet undermanagement is costing you every single day. It robs you of having more positive experiences in the workplace and prevents you from reaching greater success.

Undermanagement gets in the way of your learning and development, makes it harder for you to optimize relationships, and diminishes your opportunities for new tasks, responsibilities and projects.

Undermanagement very likely causes you to earn less than you should and prevents you from gaining more flexibility in your schedule and other work conditions.

So, who is responsible for this undermanagement epidemic? After all, isn’t it the manager’s job to manage? Shouldn’t the bosses be taking charge? Yes, I believe managing is a sacred responsibility.

Unfortunately, too many leaders, managers, and supervisors don’t provide enough guidance, direction, support and coaching. But your boss is the key to getting what you need to survive and succeed at work.

That’s why, the second person you have to manage every day is your boss. (First, of course, manage yourself.)

Every day, make sure you know for sure exactly what is expected of you, how you will track your performance, and how to get the resources you need or else work around resource gaps.

The only way to do that is to make sure you have a regular ongoing structured dialogue with your boss—ten minutes every day or at least thirty minutes once a week.