Media spotlight: The One Minute Manager

14 June 2010

With intense pressure on firms to toe the Financial Services Authority line, effective management has never been more important in the mortgage sector.

But irrespective of any regulatory pressure the broader principle of improving your management techniques to ensure staff are motivated and performing as they should is a sound one, in good times and bad.

If you can get everyone on board to keep profits up and the regulator at bay it’s a win-win situation.

And that certainly will be the case after reading Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson’s The One Minute Manager.

With more than a million copies sold, the book makes the claim on its back cover that it is now compulsory reading among American and Japanese companies, and you can see why.

Rather than adopting a dry ’do this, do that’ format The One Minute Manager tells the story of a svengali-like manager.

The other main character is a young man looking for a good manager to work for.

He comes across tough managers and nice managers but what he’s really looking for is an effective manager, and eventually he hears about just such a man - the one-minute manager.

So the young man visits the company to meet the one-minute manager and the rest of the book involves the latter explaining his techniques.
The manager initially appears to be a bit of maverick. He doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything and tells the young man that he doesn’t like to participate in any of his staff’s decision-making.

But then the young man walks round the manager’s office and talks to his employees who are all in awe of the man. What’s more, they all replicate the one-minute manager’s techniques with their subordinates and eventually the young man realises there might be something to it.

There are three main elements to the manager’s technique - one-minute goal-setting, one-minute praising and the one-minute reprimand.

Basically, the technique breaks down as simplifying a goal down to 250 words on a single piece of paper, praising as soon as you see positive behaviour and criticising negative behaviour the moment it materialises.

Initially, some of the ideas come across as a bit weird. For example, in one-minute praising it is recommended that you “shake hands or touch people in a way that makes it clear that you support their success in the organisation”. Sounds like the start of a sexual harassment claim to me.

But it is explained that touching is only appropriate when you have established a rapport with the person.

And the parallels the book makes between teaching killer whales tricks or potty training dogs and training staff are well judged.
Fans of Cesar Millan’s television show The Dog Whisperer will be familiar with these techniques.

In essence, the idea is that people only learn by positive reinforcement when they are doing right and sharp criticism when they are doing wrong.

At just over 100 pages long The One Minute Manager is a quick way of getting a fresh take on how you can manage your staff and business.

Book review by Robert Thickett

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