My summary of “The One Minute Manager”

In the last year, I’ve come across a few book reviews, probably just like you. Every time I did, I thought to myself… Why not do it as well? Why not give back? Why read all those books if only for the sake of learning? I mean, learning is great, but learning by myself is only half the fun, and more importantly why not share it? So find below my very short, but “first-ever” book summary about The One Minute Manager

The one minute manager is a very short and brief book that tries to convey a few but very strong messages in regards to what good management looks like. Thus, you can easily read it within approx. 1,5 hours.
In essence, it’s a story about a young fellow that wanders through all sorts of companies to find a “good manager”. So when he finally hears of this dude — “The one minute manager” — who supposedly is very good at managing, he can’t help but visit him. So he does and by that gets — as he likes to stress — ” clear and uncluttered” ideas about how to best manage people.
In the following, I state (including my interpretation of it) what our protagonist learned from “The one minute manager”.
Besides simply caring for his/her “reports” and being a good/honest/sincere person, a one minute manager does the following three things regularly:

• One minute goal setting
• One minute praising
• One minute reprimand

And as he explains in the book, quite late, but he does, no it does not need to be one minute! The one minute should just show us that this “can be” easy and does not need to take a vast amount of time.

One page that summarizes the book well is page 61.

page 61: best summary of the idea

One thing worth mentioning is the manager’s plaques that he keeps showing our protagonist throughout the book, which as the manager tells him, are there to constantly remind him of the important things. For instance:

• The best minute I spend is the one I invest in people
• Goals begin behaviors, consequences maintain behaviors (this one is more or less the story behind the three things)

Let’s dive deeper:

One minute goal setting is…

1. Agree on your goals
2. See what good behavior looks like
3. Write out each of your goals on a single sheet of paper using less than 250 words.
4. Read and re-read each goal, which requires only a minute or so each time you do it
5. Take a minute every once in a while out of your day to look at your performance, and
6. See whether or not your behavior matches your goal.

One minute praising is…

1. Tell people upfront that you are going to let them know how they are doing.
2. Praise people immediately
3. Tell people how good you feel about what they did right, and how it helps the organization and the other people who work there.
4. Stop for a moment of silence to let them “feel” how good you feel.
5. Encourage them to do more of the same.
6. Shake hands or touch people in a way that makes it clear that you support their success in the organization.

Worth mentioning here, in this section he showed two particularly helpful plaques:

• Help people reach their full potential, and catch them doing something right.
• People who feel good about themselves produce good results

One minute reprimand is…

1. Tell the people beforehand that you are going to let them know how they are doing and in no uncertain terms.
2. Reprimand people immediately
3. Tell people what they did wrong — be specific
4. Tell people how you feel about what they did wrong — and in no uncertain terms.
5. Stop for a few seconds of uncomfortable silence to let them feel how you feel.
6. Shake hands, or touch them in a way that they know you are honestly on their side
7. Remind them how much you value them.
8. Reaffirm that you think well of them but not of their performance in this situation
9. Realize that when the reprimand is over, it’s over

Regarding reprimands he shows the following two plaques that one should keep in mind with reprimands:

• We are not just our behavior, we are the person managing our behavior
• Everyone is a potential winner, some people are disguised as losers, don’t let their appearance fool you

Review: To put it short I liked the book, since its a nice story, a short read, and a few simple and easy-to-digest messages. One thing I can add to it is that in my opinion managers are certainly not these supernatural human beings, who know everything better. Particularly in the software engineering world, where I live in and where people are hired to tell them (the company and the boss) what to do, this is more and more untrue. Yet, the idea of being clear on things, having agreed on goals, giving (praise, feedback), and taking (results, reprimands, consequences) between the both of them (manager and his/her “report”) is important and even more valid today.

Edit: If you liked this one you might also like my summary of a follow-up book called “The One Minute Manager meets the monkey”.