The New One-Minute Manager is a guide that teaches managers how to get the most out of their employees. After all, the essence of management is getting results out of an organization’s most important asset: its people. One-minute managers are those who recognize that productivity is a function of both quality and quantity: you need to get good results, and quickly.
They do this by empowering employees and giving them the motivation to do well on their own. One-minute managers do not tell people what to do: they help them realize on their own what they need to do.
New one-minute managers get great results from people by using three simple, but effective management techniques:
This entails having employees set a 250-word goal for each new task. It puts managers and employees on the same page. The manager knows what the employee is supposed to achieve, while the employee knows what to do without needing constant direction and input.
The manager and the employee sit down together to come up with task-specific goals, each readable in one minute or less. These are specific, measurable goals with deadlines, where success is clearly defined. The employee then emails the goals to the manager so they can always be checked for reference and follows up with regular progress reports.
These are effective because they define what constitutes success and promote accountability for achieving specific results. They work because employees are motivated when they have a clear idea of exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. In an ever-changing business world, managers don’t have the time to micromanage their employees. One-minute goals empower employees to be self-starters and stewards of their own success.
New one-minute managers deliver immediate and thoughtful praise when an employee does something well.
The key to a one-minute praising is that it be immediate. The manager has to be on the lookout for good behavior and praise it in real time. Instead of looking to catch their employees doing something wrong, one-minute managers make a conscious effort to catch their employees doing something right.
Good one-minute praisings are specific and consistent, and the manager must explain why the employee’s success has contributed to organizational goals. The manager then encourages the employee to do more of the same and reiterates that they are pushing for the employee to succeed.
Employees gain the confidence to achieve bigger goals later on when they receive quick praise for small accomplishments when they’re just starting out. They are also able to link their positive performance with the praising, because the praising is immediate and focused on a specific achievement. Contrast this approach with that of managers who deliver vague and dilatory positive feedback: the employee doesn’t know what they did right and therefore won’t be able to replicate it. One-minute praisings are also highly motivating for employees, as they begin catching themselves doing things right.
Managers deliver quick, specific, and consistent redirects when an employee who ought to know better makes a mistake.
One-minute redirects must be linked to the defined goals above: you can’t hold people accountable for not doing things they weren’t told they needed to do.
Redirects happen in two parts. In the first part, the manager clearly conveys that they are disappointed in the employee because they failed to achieve a specific goal or meet a specific deadline. They also need to demonstrate to the employee why their mistake hurts the organization as a whole. This needs to immediately follow the mistake and it needs to be specific to that mistake.The goal is to help people learn from errors so they don’t repeat them: this won’t happen if the redirect is vague and scattershot.
In the second part, the manager pauses and then reminds the employee that they still think highly of them overall and that the behavior is being critiqued, not the person. Lastly, when the redirect is over, it’s over. The manager bears no lingering ill will and treats the employee no differently than before, as long as the mistake isn’t repeated.
Employees don’t feel mistreated and don’t view you as an enemy. They’re being criticized for a behavior they can improve, not for a personality flaw that they can’t change.
Employees also appreciate the honesty and openness. They’re being held accountable immediately following a mistake, instead of being blindsided by it months later at a performance review (as so many managers choose to do). The redirects give the employee an opportunity to improve right away and they offer negative feedback at a manageable volume: piecemeal, as it happens, instead of all-at-once.
The book is written in the form of a narrative fable. In this story, a young man visits the new one minute manager and learns from him the three secrets of successful one-minute management. We later learn that he applies these principles in his own life and career to great effect, becoming a one-minute manager himself. In this summary, we leave out this narrative framing device to focus solely on the principles, since the plot doesn’t add much beyond conversation around the principles.
Also, this is primarily a summary of The New One-Minute Manager, the updated and revised version of the original book. This core principles are the same as in the original book, but The New One-Minute Manager applies these ideas to make them more relevant for today’s rapidly evolving business world. To provide the richest reader experience, we’ve incorporated ideas from both versions of the text.
The New One-Minute Manager is all about how to use effective management to get the most out of the people in your organization. The people you manage are the organization’s most valuable asset: they’re the ones who do all of the day-to-day work that enables your organization’s prosperity and success.
Thus, good managers are those who know how to motivate people to produce positive results for the organization.
Most managers fall into one of two different categories of boss.
Managers who care only about the organization. These are autocrats who treat their employees as mere cogs in a machine: they give orders, expect them to be followed, and don’t train their employees to make decisions on their own. For these bosses, you’re only as good as the numbers you produce.
Managers who only care only about people. They are overly concerned about their employees’ feelings and insufficiently focused on achieving results. These managers don’t hold their people accountable for poor performance. This hurts the organization and deprives employees of the opportunity to learn and grow from mistakes.
One-minute managers care about both results and people. These are not competing aims: they are complementary.
They instill confidence in their employees, because they know that confident people produce results. Therefore, helping people feel good about themselves is the key to getting things done, both quickly and effectively. They understand that they must tap into the skills and talents of everyone in the organization to achieve results. Talent does not reside only in the executive office.
One-minute managers are also time-management experts. As their name would suggest, most of the techniques they use can take as little as one minute. In today’s interconnected, fast-moving world, your organization needs to be adaptive. It’s not enough to just do good work: you have to produce it quickly and efficiently. Productivity is a function of both quality and quantity.
One-minute managers invest in the organization’s most important asset: its people. They know that the best minute you spend is the one spent investing in people. Think about this: 50-70 percent of a typical company’s budget gets spent on salary, but less than 1 percent on training. Given how important employees are to the achievement of company goals, this is a gross misallocation of resources: more gets spent on buildings and equipment than people!
One-minute managers put in the work to make their employees self-supported and self-motivated. They don’t make decisions for their employees: they guide them to make decisions for themselves.
This is more important than ever before. New technologies and tools of communication are transforming the way organizations operate every day. Your organization needs to be quick on its feet to survive: the old top-down, command-and-control style of management is simply too slow and unresponsive to keep organizations agile and adaptive. One-minute managers succeed where other managers fail, because they empower the people in their organization to take responsibility and manage themselves, with minimal direct input. This saves valuable time and resources.
Too many managers practice manipulation: getting people to do things that they’re either not aware of or don’t agree to. Manipulative managers often use a mix of threats, coercion, and neglect to force people to do their bidding. Employees feel taken advantage of, misled, and used, and end up bitter and having learned nothing from their experience.
One-minute managers believe in empowering employees, not manipulating them. An empowerment-focused management style treats everyone as a potential high-achiever. You bring out the best in people when you give them the structure and the right mix of positive and negative feedback that motivates them to perform well on their own. You can only do this, however, if you treat them as full human beings worthy of respect. They aren’t cogs in a machine or robots programmed to do a task: they’re people, and you need to take account of their complexity and emotions as people if you’re to manage them successfully.
Giving your people clear goals and then judging their performance based on those goals puts everyone on the same page and creates a truly honest, open, and empowering working relationship: goals begin positive behaviors and consequences maintain them.
One-minute goals are the foundation of the one-minute manager philosophy. They set the tone for all subsequent interactions between the manager and the employee, because they are the gold standard against which all of the employee’s subsequent feedback (both positive and negative) will be held. Anything that is measurable, has a clear standard of success or failure, and that has a deadline, can be defined as a goal.
At the beginning of a new task or responsibility, you sit down with your employee to come up with specific goals related to that task. Each goal and its performance standard should be defined in no more than 250 words, making it readable in one minute or less.
Goals should be clear and define what constitutes success or failure. Deadlines are an important part of this definition, putting everyone on the same page about when items are due. These written performance standards allow you as the one-minute manager to determine whether or not your employee has lived up to her goals.
Once agreed on, the employee follows up regularly regarding the goals:
The 80/20 rule (also known as the Pareto Principle) is a useful tool that will help you and your team avoid setting too many goals that are hard to keep track of. The 80/20 rule stipulates that 80 percent of the results come from 20 percent of the goals. Thus, you should rank the most important tasks to be accomplished in order of importance and design your employees’ goals to only focus on the first 20 percent of items on that list. This means that most goals will be fairly large and long-term.
This keeps the overall number of goals for each employee down to a manageable level, usually three to six goals total.
What makes one-minute goals such an effective management tool?
They define what constitutes success and gives employees a target to drive toward. Many employees struggle because they don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. This ambiguity around purpose is highly demotivating to employees. In this scenario, people get discouraged because there is no defined standard for success or failure, so any feedback they do receive seems arbitrary and capricious (especially if it’s negative).
With clearly defined goals, however, employees know exactly what to work on each day. They have an unambiguous idea of what success in their job means. Furthermore, they know how their work is contributing to the organization’s goals, which is motivating.
One-minute goals enable accountability. It’s much harder for things to fall through the cracks, because everything is clearly set down in writing and can be checked at any time through email. As a manager, you can better spot when there’s a gap between what’s supposed to be happening and what’s actually happening. Plus, your employees know exactly how they’re being measured and why they’re receiving the feedback you’re giving them. They don’t have to wait for annual performance reviews to know this, since you’re communicating with them on their progress on a regular basis (we’ll get into this latter point later in this summary).
(Shortform note: Today’s one-minute managers can also take advantage of many professional third-party project management tools. These let you organize goals into sub-tasks, view all of your team’s projects in a dashboard, and set automatic deadline reminders, among other features. These tools can be especially useful if you’re managing a large and cross-functional team.)
One-minute goals are powerful motivators. Employees are happier and more productive when they have clear, stated objectives. This is because you’re able to give them meaningful and task-specific feedback on the work they’re doing. They’re learning and getting better at their jobs, because you’re aligning their day-to-day work with longer-term goals: they’re not working in a vacuum.
Think about what happens when you don’t give your team goals. Without goals, people have little basis on which to judge their own performance. They instead resort to self-evaluating based on whether or not they’ve been disciplined (which is typically the only type of feedback they receive under this style of management). If your employees believe that simply not being criticized by you is indicative of good performance (“No news is good news”), then you’re too disengaged and not providing enough structure for them to succeed. This will only hurt you and your organization in the long-run.
One-minute goals free you and your employees from the dreaded micromanagement cycle. Fundamentally, micromanagers don’t trust their employees: that’s why they feel the need to scrutinize everything their team does. This wastes everyone’s time, decreases morale, and hurts productivity because your employees never learn how to do anything on their own.
One-minute goals establish that crucial foundation of trust right at the outset. You know your team is working on the right things, because you worked out the goals and performance standards with them directly.
Think about these questions to help you set goals and manage expectations.
Have you ever struggled in a job because you were unclear about what you were supposed to be doing? Describe the situation. How do you think you could have avoided this ambiguity?
Write out 3-5 one-minute goals for yourself in your personal or professional life, as well as clear performance standards for each.
How can you hold yourself accountable to these goals? (Suggestions: check your goals regularly to make sure your work aligns with them; send reports on progress regularly.)
Once they’ve set goals, one-minute managers use one-minute praisings to motivate their employees. One-minute praisings are quick bursts of positive affirmation delivered by the manager to the employee when the employee has done something that helps the organization.
In many organizations, people are only given feedback when they’re doing something wrong. This is demotivating and puts employees on edge. Consistently and immediately praising people for their work lets people know how they’re doing and encourages them to work even harder to earn even more praise.
Before you get started with one-minute praisings, you need to do a few things beforehand.
1. Tell your employees right up front that you’ll be giving them immediate feedback. This sets the expectation right out of the gate and eliminates and chance of them being surprised or caught off-guard. You want them to internalize your praise: they might not do this if they’re caught off-guard.
2. Have your employees keep careful records of all their progress toward their goals and make sure they share that progress with you on a regular basis. You want to catch them doing something right. This is what truly sets the stage for one-minute praisings. Contrast this to what what so many ineffective managers do: scanning through their employees’ results looking for something that they’ve done wrong, so they can reprimand them.
Each one-minute praising follows a specific sequence of steps. Complete the sequence, and you’ll give a complete praising that’s meaningful and specific.
Employees need to know that they are being evaluated based on how they’ve delivered on the one-minute goals they created with you. This makes the praising specific and actionable. The employee will know they’re on the right track and will keep working hard on their goals because they’ve been motivated by your praise praise.
Tell your employee precisely what they did right.
Don’t give generic compliments like, “You’re doing a great job.” An employee won’t know what they did specifically and won’t learn anything from a praising like that.
Instead, be specific and pointed. Example: “Excellent work on that Q3 sales projections presentation! Your research was thorough, you answered all the questions confidently, and you’ve improved your speaking voice.” Specificity like this shows them that you’re paying attention to their work product.
Tell the employee how good it makes you as the manager feel and how it helps the organization.
People want to know that their individual efforts are contributing to the achievement of something larger. By connecting their performance with organization performance, you’re letting them know that their work is valuable (and valued).
Example: “That presentation made me really happy and proud to have you on our team. I hired you because I saw you had potential, and I can clearly see that you’re living up to it.”
Let the employee savor the moment: pause, let them speak, let them feel good.
Then, set a new benchmark for the future by encouraging them to continue and build upon their good work. This is key, since you’ll be delivering less and less praise each time an employee does the same thing right. Thus, you need to encourage them to achieve new heights.
Lastly, show that you’re invested in them by expressing confidence in them and sharing that you support their success and goals by saying something like, “You’re on the right track here and I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure you keep on succeeding. Keep it up!”
Be timely: give one-minute praisings immediately after you’ve caught the employee doing something right. This effectively establishes the connection between the good behavior and the positive reinforcement you’re giving them. If it’s delayed, it’ll be harder for the employee to connect the dots.
Be consistent: give praise when it’s deserved, even when other areas of the company aren’t doing well. It’s not fair (and very demotivating to hardworking employees) to withhold deserved praise from individuals because of factors beyond their control. Apply this at the individual level too: praise people when they do something right, even if they simultaneously messed something up in another area of their job.
Praise generously with new hires. These employees should get positive feedback even when they only get something approximately right. Then as they make progress, only give a one-minute praise when they get it exactly right.
For example, when a child is first learning to speak, you praise them for making any vocalization at all. Then, you only praise them when they make approximations of words, like “wah-wah” instead of water. Finally, you only praise them when they correctly say “water.” The standards of performance are lower for someone who is just learning than they are for someone who’s further along.
Eventually, your one-minute praisings will become less and less frequent. As your employees develop and grow, they’ll become motivated to catch themselves doing something right. They become champions and ambassadors of their own success, coming to you with their positive results to request their own one-minute praisings.
Why are one-minute praisings an effective and motivating management tool?
One-minute praisings efficiently communicate to your employees how they’re doing. They don’t need to wait for an annual performance review to hear from you. This allows for performance improvement to happen immediately and be a continuous process. They’ll know right away when they’re doing the correct thing, so they’ll know to keep on doing it. This is especially helpful with new goals and new employees, who might not yet know what constitutes success in your organization.
Your employees won’t feel you only talk to them when they’re doing something wrong. Their motivation will be positive: they’ll want to top their performance to earn another one-minute praising, rather than just doing the bare minimum to simply avoid being punished.
Praise for achieving small goals leads to the achievement of bigger goals. People are spurred by previous success. Eventually, you stop praising them for achieving goals that they’ve already reached, and only issue new praise for new accomplishments. The goals get progressively harder, but not so hard that they can’t be reached.
One-minute praisings help you steer clear of the “leave alone-zap” management style. This latter style is when managers 1) don’t give new hires any direction or guidance on what they’re supposed to be doing, and then 2) zap them with harsh criticism when they make a mistake. The employee learns nothing from this experience, except to do as little as possible, take no risks, and show no ambition, for fear of getting zapped again. They’ll huddle in their proverbial corner become demotivated to do anything, because they don’t even know what caused them to get zapped in the first place.
Work through these exercises to think about how one-minute praising can improve your performance.
Think of someone you would like to praise for their work. Write down praise that’s specific that relates to exactly what they did, and why you appreciated it.
Have you ever waited too long to deliver praise to someone? Describe the situation and why you chose to delay giving positive feedback. In future situations, how do you think people would be more motivated by you giving them immediate praise?
You can’t praise employees’ good work without also holding them accountable them when they don’t perform up to expectations. The two balance out to keep workers on track to achieving their goals. As a one-minute manager, you need to master the one-minute redirect technique.
(In the old version of The One-Minute Manager, these were called “One-Minute Reprimands.”)
For one-minute redirects to work, you need to do a few things first.
You won’t be able to point out when an employee hasn’t performed up to standards if you never set those standards in the first place. It’s not fair (and it’s ineffective) to reprimand someone for not doing something they didn’t know they were supposed to be doing. Check that the goal is clear too. Sometimes, goals can be unclear, unrealistic, or poorly designed. That’s ok. Just make sure you take responsibility for that as the manager and clarify the goal with your employee.
As with one-minute praisings, set expectations beforehand by telling employees that you’ll be giving immediate feedback. This matters even more with one-minute redirects: it’s hard for anyone to hear negative feedback about their performance, no matter how constructively you deliver it as their manager. Setting expectations early minimizes the potential that they’ll feel so blindsided by your criticism that they don’t hear it and don’t learn anything from it.
Also, only redirect people who have the experience to know better. As we’ve seen, people who are just starting out need encouragement and positive reinforcement. Unless it’s an extreme example, you don’t want the first feedback you give to a new hire to be negative.
Once you’re sure you need to re-direct, the one-minute redirect has two distinct halves. The first half focuses on the mistake itself.
Begin the redirect immediately following a mistake. Again, delay only breeds resentment and confusion, particularly with negative feedback like this. If you spring it on them weeks later, your employee will feel like you were being dishonest by not mentioning it during all of the intervening time.
Confirm the facts and explain precisely what went wrong. Tie it to the employee’s one-minute goals so that they clearly see the disconnect between the desired results and the actual performance.
For example, “That report you just delivered was past the deadline that we had set out in your goals. It was also poorly researched and incomplete because you omitted these items.” Your employees won’t learn from mistakes without this degree of specificity.
Explain your feelings as a manager (anger, disappointment, frustration) and why their mistake hurts the organization.
For example, “I’m disappointed because we were depending on that report to establish our quarterly marketing targets. Because you submitted a subpar report, we’re going to have to revise our targets downward, which sets the whole company back.”
This connects individual performance to company results. In effect, you’re saying, “By not pulling your weight, you’re hurting the goals that we’re all working towards.”
After this, take a pause for a few seconds, and let your employee feel concerned about the impact of your words. Then, you’re ready to begin the second half, focusing on the person.
Keep it about the issue and don’t make it personal.
One-minute redirects are not meant to be punitive: they’re meant to be instructional. You want to correct the behavior so that it doesn’t happen again. Make it clear that you’re criticizing behavior and performance, not their inherent ability to do things right. It’s quite the opposite, in fact: you’re redirecting them precisely because you know they have the capacity to do better. You’re building people up, not tearing them down.
Remind your employee that you think highly of them overall and that your anger/disappointment is because you have high expectations that they failed to meet in this case. For example, saying something like, “I still think highly of you as an employee. The reason we’re having this discussion is because I know you have the necessary experience to do better than this. I’m confident that you’ll learn from this experience and won’t repeat this mistake again.”
People need to know that bad feedback in one area doesn’t mean that they are failing on all levels.
This approach also keeps the employee from getting defensive, feeling mistreated, and viewing you as an enemy. Employees won’t take anything away from the redirect if they feel they’re just being torn down. You want them to own their mistake and learn from it. They’re correcting a specific behavior, not some deep-seated and unchangeable personality flaw.
When the redirect is over, it’s over. There should be no lingering resentment on your part. This is crucial to keeping the redirect about issues. If you continue to be upset afterwards, your employee will think that you dislike them personally or think poorly of their overall performance. They’ll become resigned to this fact and won’t work to improve their performance, because they’ll think it won’t make a difference.
Apply these principles when implementing the one-minute redirect.
Hold employees accountable for mistakes even if things are going well elsewhere. People can’t get away with covering up their mistakes in one area by doing well in another area. If you make a mistake, you get a redirect, regardless of other circumstances.
Lead by example and be willing to admit and laugh at your own mistakes. Managers who refuse to hold themselves accountable are setting themselves up for failure. Employees will see you as unreasonable and hypocritical, and ultimately refuse to take their own redirects seriously.
What makes one-minute redirects so effective?
This means that employees rarely make the same mistake twice, because they have been shown the discrepancy between their goals and their performance, without being made to feel that they’re incompentent or stupid.
Your employee drives her own corrected behavior. She knows that her manager is confident in her abilities. Therefore, she’ll want to work harder to prove to you (and to herself) that she can indeed rise above the mistake and live up to those expectations.
Employees see that you’re on top of things. Accordingly, they’ll start holding themselves up to a high standard when they see that they are called to account for their mistakes. One-minute redirects also give employees the chance to improve their performance right away. You’re calling out and correcting problematic behaviors immediately. This means that employees don’t develop bad ingrained working habits. This helps both the organization and the individual employees themselves.
Ongoing feedback is more effective than a one-time annual performance review—you get good performance day-by-day, rather than poor performance through many months.
Moreover, the feedback is manageable. Your employees won’t overwhelmed with the feedback, because it happens in short sessions and is limited to one topic at a time.
Think about how the opposite dynamic works. It’s overwhelming for an employee to receive criticism all at once, as in a performance review. They will feel that they have been unfairly blindsided with a litany of months-old grievances about a wide range of topics. This is not conducive to the employee learning from these mistakes: instead, they’re likely to just become bitter and defensive.
Of course, this isn’t going to work every time. Some employees simply don’t have the talent or work ethic to learn from their mistakes. Consequently, they repeat the same mistakes over and over again and you find yourself giving one-minute redirects about the same issue. As a manager, you need to ask yourself if it’s worthwhile keeping someone around who can’t or won’t learn from mistakes. You might need to transfer, demote, or even terminate such an employee.
Work through these exercises to discover how you can use one-minute redirects in your life and career.
Think of someone in your professional or personal life whose performance needs some correction. Describe the situation.
Write out how you would use the one-minute redirect to get them to produce better results. Use the ideas from the chapter.
In a few sentences, describe how you can redesign your feedback process to give people immediate and specific criticism, rather than saving it up for a later date.