The New One Minute Manager

by Kenneth H. Blanchard

Take a Minute To Look At Your Goals. Then Look At What

You’re Doing And See If It Matches Your Goals.

“One example is when parents first help children learn to walk. Can you imagine standing a child up and saying, ‘Walk,’ and when he falls down you pick him up and spank him and say, ‘I told you to walk’? “Instead, you stand the child up and the first day he wobbles a little bit, and you get all excited and say, ‘He stood, he stood!’ and you hug and kiss the child. The next day he stands for a moment and maybe wobbles a step, and you are all over him with kisses and hugs. “Finally, the child, realizing that this is a pretty good deal, starts to stand on his legs more and more until he eventually walks. “The same thing goes for teaching a child to speak. Suppose you wanted a child to say, ‘Give me a glass of water, please.’ If you waited until the child said the whole sentence before you gave her any water, the child

would die of thirst. “So you start off by saying, ‘Water, water.’ All of a sudden one day the child says, ‘Waller.’ You jump all over the place, hug and kiss the child, and get Grandmother on the phone so the child can say, ‘Waller, waller.’ That wasn’t ‘water,’ but it was close.

“Now, you don’t want a kid going into a restaurant at the age of twenty-one asking for a glass of ‘waller,’ so after a while you only accept the wor...

“So the key in the beginning,” the young man said, “is to catch

somebody doing something approximately right until they can eventually learn to do it right.”

“At work, and in life, too, you don’t have to catch a winner doing things right very often, because good performers catch themselves doing things right. But people who are learning benefit from praise and encouragement from others.”

“Sadly, that is what too many organizations do with new, inexperienced people. They welcome them aboard, take them around to meet everybody, and then leave them alone. Not only do they not catch the new people doing anything approximately right, but periodically they zap them just to keep them moving.

“If you’ve been in any organization, and I understand you’ve visited many, you know because you’ve seen them. They do as little as possible.”

“Working with that kind of a manager, you can understand why so many people don’t enjoy their work.”

“That’s a great story. Punishment doesn’t work when you use it with someone who’s learning.

“Rather than punish inexperienced people who are still learning, we need to re-direct them. That involves resetting clear One Minute Goals to make sure they understand what’s expected of them and what good performance looks like.”

The young man asked, “So, after you have done that, do you try to catch them doing something approximately right again?” “Precisely. In the beginning you’re always trying to notice situations w...

“To begin with, the feedback happens in small doses, because you catch the mistake early on. “Many managers gunnysack their feedback. That is, they store up observations of poor behavior until frustration builds. “When performance review time comes, these managers are angry in general because their sack is really full. So they charge in and dump it all at one time. “They tell people every single thing they have done wrong for the last several weeks or months or more. “It’s not fair to people to save up negative feelings about their poor performance, and it’s not effective.”

“Yes, some parents and spouses do that, too, and they get the same poor results. “What happens then is people usually end up disagreeing about the facts, or they simply keep quiet and become resentful. Often, the person receiving the feedback becomes defensive. They don’t own what they have done wrong. “This is another version of the leave-alone-zap way of communicating.

“If managers would address things earlier, they could deal with one behavior at a time and the person would not be overwhelmed. They’d be more likely to hear the feedback the way it was intended. That’s why I think performance review should be an ongoing process, not something you do only once a year.”

“So is that why the Re-Direct works? Because the manager deals fairly and clearly with one behavior at a time, so the person receiving the feedback can hear it?” “Yes. You want to get rid of the bad behavior but keep the good person, so you don’t attack the person just because they’ve made a mistake.”

The goal is not to tear people down, but to build them up. “When our self-concept is under attack, we feel a need to defend ourselves and our actions, even to the extent of distorting the facts. When people become defensive, they don’t learn.

“So you want to separate their behavior from their worth.

Reaffirming them after you’ve addressed the mistake focuses on their behavior without ...

“When you walk away, you want the person aware of and concerned about what they did, instead of turning to a coworker and talking about how they were mistreated or what they think of your leadership style. “Otherwise, the person takes no res...

“Once upon a time, an emperor appointed a second-in-command. He called him the prime minister and, in effect, said to him, ‘Why don’t we divide up the tasks? Why don’t you do all the punishing and I’ll do all the rewarding?’ The prime minister said, ‘Fine. I’ll do all the punishing and you do all the rewarding.’” “I think I’m going to like this story,” the young man said. “You will,” the Manager said with a knowing smile. “Now, this emperor soon noticed that whenever he asked someone to do something, they might do it or they might not do it. However, when the prime minister spoke, people moved.

“So the emperor called the prime minister back in and said, ‘Why don’t we divide the tasks again? You have been doing all the punishing here for quite a while. Now let me do the punishing and you do the rewarding.’ So the prime minister and the emperor switched roles. “Within a month there was a revolt. The emperor had been a nice person, rewarding and being kind to everyone; then he started to punish people. People said, ‘What’s wrong with that old codger?’ and they threw him out on his ear. “When they came to look for a replacement, they said, ‘You know who’s really starting to come around now? The prime minister.’ So they made him emperor.”