The Premise

A young man seeking effective managers meets “tough” bosses who emphasize results over people and “nice” supervisors who emphasize people over results.

He’s frustrated until he meets the actual “One Minute Manager,” who supports both “people and results.” The one-minute manager explains core ideas like, “People who feel good about themselves produce good results.”

The one-minute manager offers three management secrets to “help people reach their full potential.” He suggests using “One Minute Goal Setting” to boil goals down to one page (plus the applicable standards); “One Minute Praising” to give workers clear, brief compliments; and the “One Minute Reprimand” to tell workers quickly how they’ve erred while letting them know you value them as people and as employees. To help people reach their top performance, the mythical minute manager suggests, “catch them doing something right” and offer immediate praise. He tells his young protégé not to feel threatened when he encourages other people to reach their potential. The greater your employees’ successes, the higher you will climb in your company.

Blanchard and Johnson suggest praising your staff members as soon as they do something right. Make sure their colleagues know you praised them. When you praise people, look them directly in the eye and tell them exactly what they did right. Tell them how good you feel about their accomplishment. This helps employees become more aware when they do things right, so they will start praising themselves.

Setting and Meeting Goals

Goal-setting follows the 80/20 principle, which means that 80% of your desired results will come from only 20% of your goals. The authors say to prioritize the 20% of your goals that will bring the greatest returns. Select three to six goals, and communicate them to your employees. Ensure they understand that you consider these goals their main responsibilities and will hold them accountable. Once you set job responsibilities for your employees, clarify your expected “performance standards.” Honor those who reach them.

Spencer and Johnson urge encouraging your employees to identify and solve their own problems. If they need help, don’t focus on their attitudes or feelings. Help them analyze what’s happening in observable, measurable terms. If they can’t perceive and explain the problem, they’re just complaining. The authors assert that a real problem exists only when there is a difference between what an employee wants to happen and what is happening. Your employees, they say, should be able to create different solutions and devise possible outcomes to determine the best action.

Managers who set clear goals and guide their people by praising and reprimanding as per the three secrets must master honest communication, respect their workers, and commit to expending the time and energy to watch new staffers closely for significant periods of time. This advice marks where The One Minute Manager’s real-world problems begin.

Pat Homilies

Six staffers report to the book’s one-minute manager, who apparently only supervises and counsels. The book never addresses strategy, planning, corporate organization or company policies. Blanchard and Johnson indulge in disingenuous management-speak and use pat homilies that would cause modern workers to roll their eyes like laundry dryers, for example, “Nobody ever really works for anybody else” and “I don’t make decisions for other people.” This can’t be true even in the universe of the book’s fictitious firm. Someone has executive and veto power and makes decisions for other people. One-minute magic seems best designed for established businesses and fast action. Even 30 years ago, this wouldn’t work for a disrupted business, during periods of rapid technological change or in any industry where results take years to unfold.

Feedback

The advice that consistent, objective feedback shows your concern for your employees seems more durable. Correctly presented, feedback can boost employees’ dedication, commitment and performace. Improving your employees pays off financially. The most productive minute you can put in, Blanchard and Johnson explain, is the one you spend “investing” in your people. Feedback about results is “the number one motivator.” Receiving high-quality feedback enables people to adjust their behavior. For example, when someone is bowling, he or she needs to see the pins. As the pins fall or remain standing, a bowler understands instantly the results of his or her effort. That is instant feedback.

“NIHYSOB”

The authors caution against the common, unfair mistake of not telling people what you expect of them and then telling them they did something wrong when they didn’t do what you expected. This is the NIHYSOB (or gotcha) approach to employee management. The acronym means “Now I have you, you SOB!” Insecure or incompetent managers revel in this attitude because taking it always puts an employee on the defensive or in the wrong. NIHYSOB often rears its ugly head when mediocre or easily threatened managers conduct performance reviews. Few tactics irritate employees more or do a better job of spurring them to seek employment elsewhere.

Few moments in The One-Minute Manager date it quite as much as this sort of outdated slang and clumsy acronym. NIHYSOB best illustrates the difference between the era of the authors’ writing and today. But it is handy as a bona fide worst example. If you can read the NIHYSOB section and still recognize this book’s underlying worth and timeless message, then the book’s slightly dated style won’t put you off its better bits of advice.

Conditioning Behavior

The one-minute manager advises reviewing your goals and checking your achievements against those goals. When you think about your objectives, examine your performance and ask yourself if your behavior matches your goals. And now that you’ve checked yourself, check your staff. If an employee’s behavior doesn’t match your goals, apply the principles of conditioning to help the staff member align his or her behavior more closely. The process works like training pigeons. To train a pigeon to walk to a pellet machine in the far corner of a box, you draw a line near the entrance at the opposite corner. Each time the pigeon crosses the line, you reward it with a food pellet and draw new lines further from the entrance and closer to the pellet machine. Eventually the pigeon will run to the far corner to get the pellets. Reward people every time they come closer to their goals. Reward by reward, they will manifest the desired behavior or achieve the set goals.