🧠 Less's Key Ideas from The One Minute Manager
by Kenneth H. Blanchard

In most organizations when you ask someone what they do and then ask their manager the same question, you often get two different answers. This means some people don't know what their job is. In these situations, it's difficult to drive accountability. It's impossible to be a good manager without being on the same page with your team members about what high performance looks like.

With one-minute goals, managers make it clear what their peoples' individual responsibilities are and what they are being held accountable for.

One-minute managers don't set goals for their people. They help their people to develop their own goals

Applying the Pareto principle, or 80/20 rule, 80 percent of your results will come from 20 percent of your effort. So, you want to set goals related to the key areas of your responsibilities that represent the 20 percent. This usually results in three to five goals. If an unexpected project or priority arises, you'll set a new one-minute goal to account for it.

One-minute managers regularly encourage their people to review what they're doing to see if it matches their goals.

One-minute managers try to catch their team members doing something right. And when they do, they provide a one-minute praising as soon as possible.

The most important thing to do to help an employee succeed is to catch them doing something approximately right in the beginning so they’re motivated to eventually learn to do it entirely right. Don’t wait until people do something exactly right to provide praise.

When you give a one-minute praising, you spend the first 30 seconds letting the person know the specific thing they did right along with how good you feel about it and why. You then pause for a moment to allow the person to feel good about what they've done. Then, you spend the next 25 seconds, encouraging them to do more of the same and reminding them that you have confidence in them to succeed.

One-minute redirects are about helping people manage themselves so they can succeed when you are not around. Making a mistake is not a problem, but failing to learn from one is. Redirects help people learn by showing them what they need to do differently.

One-minute managers do not shy away from negative feedback. When a team member makes a significant mistake, they provide a one-minute redirect as soon as possible. When you address things early and often, it allows you to deal with one poor behavior at a time. This makes the person more likely to internalize and act on the feedback. Redirects allow you to deliver feedback in small doses instead of waiting until your frustration builds from multiple, repetitive mistakes.

When someone makes a mistake, first make sure their goals are clear. If the goals are unclear, take responsibility and create clarity. Ensuring your team members have clear targets is your job as the manager.

When someone makes a mistake and the goal is clear, provide a redirect as soon as possible. First, confirm the facts and review the mistake together. Be specific. Explain how you feel about the mistake and how it impacts results. Then, pause and be quiet for a moment to allow the person to reflect. Finally, let the person know that they’re better than their mistake and that you think they are a good person. Remind them that you have trust and confidence in them and want to support their success. Then, move on together.

With one-minute redirects, don’t attack the person. You want to get rid of the bad behavior, but keep the good person. The goal is not to tear people down. You want to build them up. To do this, avoid attacking someone’s self-concept. When our self-concepts are under attack, we become emotional and defensive. Behavior and worth are not the same things. We are not our behavior. We are the person managing our behavior.