One Minute Manager

Why Praising Progress Works

/ Ken Blanchard / 1 Comment

The main idea of The New One Minute Manager is to help people reach their full potential. In the book, Spencer Johnson and I describe the Three Secrets: One Minute Goals, One Minute Praisings, and One Minute Re-Directs. I believe the most powerful of the three is One Minute Praisings.

For a One Minute Praising to be effective, you must praise the person as soon as you can and tell them in specific terms what they did right. Let them know how good you feel about what they did and encourage them to do more of the same.

As a manager, the most important thing you can do is to catch people doing something right. And when someone is just beginning to learn a task, it’s important to catch them doing something approximately right so you can help them move to the desired result.

One of my favorite examples of this is a parent teaching a child to speak. Suppose you want to teach your toddler son how to ask for a drink of water. Of course his first attempt isn’t going to be a full sentence. If you waited for him to say “Give me a glass of water, please” before you gave him a drink, that wouldn’t turn out too well. So you start by pointing to a glass of water and saying, “water, water.” After several weeks or months, all of a sudden one day your son says, “waller.” You are so excited you hug and kiss him, give him a drink of water, and get Grandma on the phone so the child can say, “waller, waller.” It wasn’t the exact way to say water—but it was close, so you praised his progress. Eventually, you only accept the word water and then you start working on please. By setting up achievable targets along the way and praising progress, you help the learner move toward the end goal.

In the workplace, unfortunately, many managers wait until people do something exactly right before praising them. The problem with this is that some people never become high performers because their managers concentrate on catching them doing things wrong, keeping an eye only on the desired performance instead of praising progress along the way.

This happens with new employees all the time. Their manager welcomes them aboard, takes them around to meet everybody, and then leaves them alone. Not only does the manager not catch the new person doing something approximately right, they periodically zap them just to keep them moving. I call this the leave-alone-zap management style. You leave a person alone, expecting good performance from them. When you don’t get it, you zap them. What do you think that does to a person’s performance and engagement?

If you set clear goals and catch your people doing things right, you’ll create a work environment where people are engaged and fully committed to doing a good job. It only takes a few minutes to praise someone for a job well done. It will be the most important minute of your day.

One Minute Goals: Are You Keeping Score?

/ Ken Blanchard

In The New One Minute Manager, Spencer Johnson and I share that setting One Minute Goals begins with the belief that everyone is a potential winner. They just need to understand what they are being asked to do and what good performance looks like.

When setting goals, managers work side by side with each direct report to write a goal statement for each of their areas of responsibility, including the standards that will be used to evaluate their performance. This provides clear direction on what the direct report needs to accomplish and how they will know they have done a good job.

Ensuring that direct reports have a way to monitor their own performance and measure progress is an important component of motivation. To explain the motivating nature of creating clear goals, in the book we share a story we heard from Scott Meyers, a longtime consultant in the field of motivation.

One night when Scott was bowling, he saw some people from an organization he previously had worked with. Everyone in this group had been described as disinterested and unmotivated. Meyers watched as one of the men who had been identified as unmotivated approached the line and rolled the bowling ball. Soon he started to clap and jump around with delight. Meyers had never seen the man so animated. Why do you think he was so happy? Because he got a strike and he knew he had performed well.

Meyers contends that the reason people in organizations are not clapping and jumping around at work is, in part, because they aren’t always clear about what is expected of them. In bowling, this would be like rolling the ball down an empty lane without any pins at the end. With no pins to knock down, there is no goal and no performance to measure. That wouldn’t be much of a game, would it?

Yet, every day in the working world, people are bowling without pins. As a result, they can’t tell their manager how they’re doing. When managers assume wrongly that the people on their team know what the goals are, no one is set up for success.

Never assume anything when it comes to goal setting. Set your people up for success by working with them to write clear One Minute Goals. Then check in occasionally and see how they are scoring. Keeping goals top of mind will help people focus on the important work and achieve higher levels of performance.

Don’t Be a One Dimensional Leader—Adjust Your Style to the Task

/ Ken Blanchard / 1 Comment

Leadership and the One Minute ManagerHarperCollins just released our revised edition of Leadership and the One Minute Manager. Much has changed since the original book was published nearly 30 years ago—workforces are more diverse, workplaces are less centralized, and technology has revolutionized business communications.  Surprisingly, much has remained the same, especially when it comes to managing people.  Today more than ever leaders have to do three important things. First, they have to help people set clear goals. Second, they have to diagnose people’s development level on each task. Third, they have to match their leadership style to the development level of the person they’re leading, to provide that person with what they need to succeed.

Notice I said “diagnose people’s development level on each task.” Even among experienced managers, it’s easy to fall into a trap of seeing people as beginners, or moderately competent, or highly experienced.  When we paint people with a broad brush—for example, assuming that because a person is an expert in one aspect of their job, they’re an expert in all aspects of their job—our assumptions often lead to misunderstandings and poor performance. Continue reading →

A Leadership Vision for America

/ Ken Blanchard / 4 Comments

In all my years of participating in and observing presidential elections, I have never heard so many people—both Democrats and Republicans—expressing disappointment with what’s going on in Washington. The complaints are not so much about the leadership capability of the current president as they are about the political system in general. Probably at no time in our country have we had so many major problems—yet we don’t seem to be making much progress in addressing them. Both parties seem to be more interested in getting their incumbents reelected than in problem solving.

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