Chapter 8
Essential Skills for Partnering for Performance: The One Minute Manager®
We are firm believers in the 80/20 rule: Eighty percent of the results that leaders need to get in working with their people come from about 20 percent of the leadership activities they could do. The three secrets of The One Minute Manager1 are a perfect example. In this book, Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson focus on three basic concepts: one minute goals, one minute praisings, and one minute reprimands or redirection. While these three skills probably represent only 20 percent of the activities that managers engage in, they could provide them with the outcome they desire (the 80 percent). These three skills are core to effective partnering for performance.
One Minute Goal Setting
Without clear goals, Situational Leadership® II doesn’t work. Why not? Because development level is task-specific. As we’ve indicated, people are not globally enthusiastic beginners, disillusioned learners, capable but cautious performers, or self-reliant achievers. It all depends on which goal area of their job you’re talking about.
According to research, goal setting is the single most powerful motivational tool in a leader’s toolkit.2 Why? Because goal setting provides purpose, challenge, and meaning. Goals are the guideposts along the road that make a compelling vision come alive. Goals energize people. Specific, clear, challenging goals lead to greater effort and achievement than easy or vague goals do.
Of course, people must have the knowledge, skills, and commitment necessary for goal achievement. That’s what Situational Leadership® II focuses on. When dealing with enthusiastic beginners and disillusioned learners, it’s probably better to set learning goals than outcome goals. For example, it is better for beginning golfers to hit balls into a net than on a driving range, because if the outcome of their efforts is evident, they could get discouraged after every shot. When they hit into a net, all they are focused on is whether they are learning how to swing properly. When these golfers begin to demonstrate a competent swing, they can go out onto the driving range.
If all good performance starts with a clear goal, how do you know a clear goal when you have one? For a goal to be clear, people need to know what they are being asked to do (their areas of accountability) and what good performance looks like (the performance standards by which they will be evaluated).
Areas of Accountability
One of the biggest obstacles to productivity improvement is the problem of unclear organizational expectations and accountability. For example, when people are asked what they do and their managers are asked what their people do, they both typically give widely divergent answers, particularly if the group is asked to prioritize their list of responsibilities. As a consequence, individuals in organizations often get punished for not doing what they didn’t know they were supposed to do.
At times, the people management deems most responsible for a specific activity may be completely unaware of their role. For example, a group of restaurant managers concerned about sales were asked, “Who is responsible for generating sales in your organization?” They said the waiters and waitresses were. But when the waiters and waitresses were asked what their primary responsibilities were, their reply was consistently “Serving food and taking orders.” They made no reference to selling. So, although it may seem very basic, managers need to make sure their people know what is expected of them.
Performance Standards
People must also know what good performance looks like. Performance standards help managers and direct reports more easily monitor performance, and they serve as a basis for evaluation. Whether an organization has clear performance standards can be determined by asking people, “Are you doing a good job?” Most people will respond by saying either “I don’t know” or “I think so.” If they answer “Yes, I think so,” a revealing follow-up question would be “How do you know?” Typical responses are “I haven’t been chewed out by my boss lately” or “No news is good news.” Such answers imply that people receive little feedback on their performance until they make a mistake. This is a sad state of affairs. That habitual practice by managers leads to the most commonly used management style in the United States: leave-alone-then-zap. This style of management can also be called “seagull management.” When someone makes a mistake, seagull managers fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on everyone, and fly out. Since this is the predominant style of management in organizations, it is no wonder that motivating people is a major organizational problem today.
Scott Meyers, a longtime consultant in the field of motivation, made the same point using a novel analogy.3 Meyers was struck by the number of unmotivated people in organizations. Yet he had never seen an unmotivated person after work. Everyone seemed to be motivated to do something.
One night when Meyers was bowling, he saw some of the “problem” employees from the last organization where he worked. One of the least motivated people—someone he remembered all too well—took the bowling ball, approached the line, and rolled the ball. The employee started to yell and jump around. Why do you think he was so happy? The answer was obvious to Meyers: The employee got a strike. He knew he had performed well—he had knocked down all the pins.
Goals Need to Be Clear
The reason people are not jumping for joy in organizations, Meyers contended, is that, in part, it is not clear what is expected of them. To continue his bowling analogy, when people approach the alley, they notice there are no pins at the end; that is, they don’t know what their goals are. How long would you want to bowl without pins? Yet, every day in the world of work, people are bowling without any pins, and, as a result, they cannot tell how well they are doing. Managers know what they want their people to do; they just don’t bother to tell them. They assume people know. Never assume anything when it comes to goal setting.
Reaching Goals Requires Feedback
When managers assume that their people know what’s expected of them, they are creating a second ineffective form of bowling. They put up the pins, but when the bowler goes to roll the ball, he notices there is a sheet across the alley. When he rolls the ball and it slips under the sheet, he hears a crack, but he doesn’t know how many pins he knocked down. When asked how he did, he says, “I don’t know, but it felt good.”
It’s like playing golf at night. A lot of our friends have given up golf. When we ask them why, they say, “The courses are too crowded.” When we suggest they play at night, they laugh, because who would ever play golf without being able to see the flags? To move toward goals, people need feedback on their performance.
As former colleague Rick Tate often said, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” Can you imagine training for the Olympics with no one telling you how fast you ran or how high you jumped? The idea seems ludicrous, yet many people operate in a vacuum in organizations, not knowing how well they are doing on their jobs.
Money motivates people only if it is feedback on results. Have you ever gotten a raise that you were pleased with, only to find out that somebody else who you don’t think works as hard as you got the same or even a better raise? Not only was that increase in money not motivating, it became demotivating once you knew it had nothing to do with results. Suddenly, it didn’t matter how hard you worked.
Once managers are convinced that the number one motivator of people is feedback on results, they usually set up a third form of bowling. When the bowler goes to the line to roll the ball, the pins are up and the sheet is still in place, but now the game has another ingredient: a supervisor standing behind the sheet. When the bowler rolls the ball, he hears the crash of the falling pins. The supervisor holds up two fingers and says, “You knocked down two.” In fact, most bosses would not phrase the feedback so positively, but would say, “You missed eight.”
Performance Reviews Can Undermine Performance
Why don’t managers lift the sheet so that everyone can see the pins? Because organizations have a strong tradition known as the performance review. We call it NIHYYSOB (“Now I have you, you S.O.B.”). Sadly, many managers use the performance review as a once-a-year opportunity to get even with their people.
As we indicated in the last chapter, the performance review process is often used to spread people over a normal distribution curve, thereby categorizing them and distorting their performance. Having a set budget or percentage for a group’s salary increases often encourages this practice. In most organizations, if six or seven people report to you, the practice of rating them all high—even if they all deserve it—is discouraged. It doesn’t take managers very long to realize that if they rate all their people high, they subsequently get rated low by their managers. The only way they can get rated high is if they rate some of their people low.
One of a manager’s toughest jobs is deciding who gets the low ratings. Most Americans grow up with this win-lose mentality, in which some people in every group must lose. It pervades our educational system. For example, a fifth-grade teacher giving a test on state capitals would never consider making atlases available during the test to allow the students to look up the answers. Why? Because all the children would get 100 percent. Can you imagine what would happen to American education if kids who had to take vocabulary tests were allowed to keep dictionaries on their desks? There would be an uproar!
Limit the Number of Goals
Three to five goals are the ideal number on which peak performers can concentrate, according to most research.4 Once these goals are established, they should be written down so that they can be frequently used to compare actual behavior to targeted behavior.
Often, goal setting is considered a paperwork activity—a necessary evil in getting the job done. When this is the case, goals are filed and people go off and do whatever they want until a performance review draws near. With one minute goal setting, the philosophy is that you should keep your goals close at hand and be able to read each in a minute or less.
Good Goals Are SMART Goals
Although most managers agree with the importance of setting goals, many do not take the time to clearly develop goals with their people and write them down. As a result, people tend to get caught in the “activity trap,” where they become busy doing things, but not necessarily the right things. To focus on what is important, you should set SMART goals with your people. SMART is an acronym for the most important factors in setting quality goals:
Specific and measurable. You have to be specific about the area that needs improvement and what good performance looks like. Being specific reinforces the old saying “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Therefore, goals have to be specific, observable, and measurable. If somebody says, “But my job can’t be measured,” offer to eliminate it to see if anything will be missed.
Motivating. Not every job people are asked to do will be super-exciting, but having motivating goals helps. Sometimes all people need to know is why the task is important. People want to know that what they do makes a difference. That’s motivating.
Attainable. What really motivates people is to have moderately difficult but achievable goals. This has been proven time and again by setting up a version of the old ring toss game. People are asked to throw rings at a stake from any distance they choose. Unmotivated people, it has been found, stand either very close to the stake, where the goal is easily accomplished, or far away, where their chances of success are minimal. High achievers, based on classic research on achievement motivation conducted by David McClelland, find the appropriate distance from the stake through experimentation.5 If they throw the rings from a certain spot and make most of their tosses, they move back. Why? It’s too easy a goal. If they miss most of their tosses, they move forward. Why? It’s too difficult a task. McClelland found that high achievers like to set moderately difficult but attainable goals—that is, goals that stretch them but are not impossible. That’s what we mean by attainable.
Relevant. As we stated earlier, we believe in the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of the performance you want from people comes from the 20 percent of the activities they could get involved in. Therefore, a goal is relevant if it addresses one of the 20-percent activities that make a difference in overall performance.
Trackable and time-bound. To praise progress or redirect inappropriate behavior, managers must be able to measure performance frequently. This means using a record-keeping system and timeline to track performance. If a goal consists of completing a report by June 1, the chances of receiving an acceptable, even outstanding, report will increase if interim reports are required and progress is praised along the way.
One Minute Praisings
Once your people understand what they are being asked to do and what good behavior looks like, you are ready for the second key to obtaining desired performance: the one minute praising. Praising is the most powerful activity a manager can do. In fact, it is the key to training people and making winners of everyone working for you. A praising focuses on reinforcing behavior that moves people closer to their goals.
Look around your organization and see if you can “catch people doing something right.” When you do, give them a one minute praising that is immediate and specific and that states your feelings.
Be Immediate and Specific
For a praising to be effective, it must be immediate and specific. Tell people exactly what they did right as soon as possible. For example, “You submitted your report on time Friday, and it was well written. In fact, I used it in a meeting today, and that report made you and me and our whole department look good.” Comments that are too general, such as “I appreciate your efforts” and “Thank you very much,” are less likely to seem sincere and thus are unlikely to be effective.
State Your Feelings
After you praise people, tell them how you feel about what they did. Don’t intellectualize. State your gut feelings: “I felt so happy and proud after hearing your financial report presentation at the Board of Directors meeting. I’m delighted you’re on our team. Thanks so much.” Although praisings do not take very long, they can have lasting effects.
Praisings Are Universally Powerful
Praisings drive all effective human interaction. These same concepts apply to any relationship, not only making people better managers, but also making them better parents, spouses, friends, and customers. Consider marriage, for example.
When you first fall in love, everything is right. You seldom see the faults or limitations of your loved one. Love is blind—you see only the positive. When you decide to get married or commit to some permanency in your relationship, you often start to see things wrong with each other. You begin to say such things as “I didn’t know you thought that” or “I can’t believe you would do something like that.” Your emphasis shifts to what’s wrong with the other person, rather than what’s right. The ultimate demise of a loving relationship is when you do something right and you get yelled at anyway because you didn’t do it right enough. You hear things like “I shouldn’t have to ask” or “You should have done it earlier.”
How do two people go from being excited about each other to squabbling? It’s really quite simple. Good relationships are all about the frequency with which you catch each other doing something right.
Being Close Counts
This discussion brings up one of the important points to remember about praising: Don’t wait for exactly the right behavior before praising someone. Catch people doing things approximately right. We want exactly right behavior, but if we wait for exactly right behavior before we recognize it, we’ll probably never get it. We have to remember that exactly right behavior is made up of a whole series of approximately right behaviors. We all know that with animals and little people—we just forget it with big people.
For example, suppose you want to teach a child who is learning to speak to say, “Give me a glass of water, please.” If you wait until the child says the whole sentence before you give her any water, the child will 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.” It isn’t “water,” but it’s close.
You don’t want a kid going into a restaurant at the age of 21 asking for a glass of waller, so after a while you only accept the word “water,” and then you start on “please.” So in training someone, you should emphasize catching that person doing something right—in the beginning, approximately right—and then gradually moving them toward the desired behavior.
Bob Davis, former president of Chevron Chemical, has as one of his favorite mottos “Praise progress—at least it’s a moving target.” What we need to do in all our interactions at work and at home is accentuate the positive and catch people doing things right, even if it’s only approximately right.
If you are having difficulty with a spouse, child, team member, boss, or friend, you have to first ask yourself, “Do I want this relationship to work?” Examine your gut feelings. If deep down you don’t want to make the relationship work, you won’t. Why? Because you have control of the qualifier—the “Yes, but...” If you want to make the relationship work, you will catch the other person doing things right or approximately right. But if you don’t want to make it work for whatever reason, you can easily undermine another person’s best efforts to please you. No matter what that person does right, you will say, “Yes, but you didn’t do this or that right.”
Make Time for Praisings
We ask people all the time, “How many of you are sick and tired of all the praisings you get at work or at home?” Everybody laughs, because most of us do not naturally think of cheering each other on. Yet we all know people who carry around in their wallet or pocketbook a praising note they got years ago. It seems “gotcha” comes more easily to most of us than “well done.” How do we break this pattern? Maybe we need to be more intentional about it.
You should set aside at least two hours a week for cheering people on. Write it on your calendar, just as you would any other appointment. Then, use the Hewlett-Packard philosophy of Management by Wandering Around.6 Wander around your operation, catch people doing things right or approximately right, and tell them about it. Do the same with your spouse, children, and friends. At home, you may not need two hours a week, but ten minutes surely wouldn’t hurt.
Reprimanding Versus Redirection
If one minute praisings are focused on catching people doing things right and accentuating the positive, the question that inevitably arises is, “That’s all well and good. What do you do if somebody’s performance is not up to snuff?”
Although the label for the third secret of the One Minute Manager is the one minute reprimand, there are actually two strategies for dealing with poor performance: one minute reprimands and redirection. A reprimand works best with people who have “won’t do” or attitudinal problems. These people are winners, and they know how to do what they are being asked to do, but for some reason they’re not doing it. Redirection is appropriate for people with “can’t do” or experience problems. These people are learners and therefore do not yet know how to do what they are being asked to do.
If there are two different strategies for dealing with poor performance, why is the one minute reprimand highlighted in The One Minute Manager? Because people generally are not very good at giving negative feedback to normally good performers. While that is still true, Ken is quick to admit that today he would probably highlight redirection. Why? Because things are changing so fast now in most fields that people’s competency to do a job is often short-lived.
Ongoing learning is necessary for all of us to keep up today. As a result, there are far fewer situations where a one minute reprimand is more appropriate than redirection. That’s one of the main reasons why Ken got excited about writing Whale Done!: The Power of Positive Relationships with one of his old writing buddies, Jim Ballard, and with Thad Lacinak and Chuck Tompkins, who’ve been training killer whales for more than thirty years.7 It doesn’t take much intelligence to realize that it wouldn’t make sense to punish a killer whale and then tell its trainers to get in the water with it. Thad and Chuck point out that there is no negative interaction between killer whales and trainers. When a whale does something right or approximately right, a praising follows. That’s why, when a whale successfully performs a trick and returns to the stage, it is greeted with a bucket of fish, a rub on its tongue, or a big hug. If the trick wasn’t up to standards, when the whale returns to the stage, the trainers don’t yell at it or punish it in any way. They simply give a hand signal that says to the whale, “Let me see that again.” If trainers can’t be positive with a whale, redirection comes into play.
Because there is a distinct difference between redirection and a reprimand, let’s take a look at each separately.
One Minute Reprimands
As we said earlier, a reprimand is appropriate only for someone who has the skills to do the job but for some reason lacks the commitment. Keeping that in mind, consider the four keys to giving a reprimand:
• First, as with one minute praising, reprimand as soon as possible after an incident. Do not save up your feelings. If you “gunnysack” and store up your feelings, when you finally let go of them, they are apt to be out of proportion to the event that triggered your emotional release. The longer you wait to give someone negative feedback, the more emotional it becomes, so give negative feedback as soon as possible. Doing so causes fewer problems.
• Second, be specific. Tell people specifically what they did wrong—for example, “John, you didn’t get your report in on time Friday” or “I notice your sales were down 20 percent this quarter.”
• Third, share your feelings about what was done. “Let me tell you how I feel about the late report, John. I’m angry because everyone else got their reports in on time, and not having your report delayed my analysis of our market position. It really frustrated me.” Don’t intellectualize about what the person did wrong. Focus on your feelings, and describe them sincerely and honestly.
• Fourth—and this is probably the most important step—reaffirm the person. In the case of the late report, you might say: “Let me tell you one other thing. You’re good. You’re one of my best people. That’s why I was angry about your late report. It’s so unlike you. I count on you to set an example for others. That’s why I won’t let you get away with that late report behavior. You’re better than that.”
Reprimand the Behavior, Not the Person
Many people can’t understand why you would praise people after you have reprimanded them. You do it for two very important reasons. First, you want to separate people’s behavior from them as individuals. That is, you want to keep the people but get rid of their poor behavior.
Second, when you walk away after reprimanding, you want people to think about what they did wrong, not about how you treated them. If no reaffirmation is done, people who are reprimanded tend to redirect their energy to you, the reprimander. Why? Because of how they were treated. For example, many reprimands not only don’t end with a praising, but end with a comment such as “And let me tell you one other thing...” and then the individual is given a parting shot: “If you think you’ll get that promotion, you have another think coming.”
Then, when you walk away, the one who has been reprimanded often turns to a coworker and, instead of discussing his poor performance, talks about the incident and the manager’s poor behavior. That person is psychologically off the hook with his poor performance, and the manager becomes the villain.
However, if you end a reprimand with a praising, you just told the person how good he is. Now that person has to think about what he did wrong, not about your leadership style.
Whenever we do not learn from our mistakes, it is often because we are attacked for those mistakes. We are called names and generally downgraded by other people who discover our mistakes—good old seagull managers.
When our self-concept is under attack, we feel the need to defend ourselves and our actions, even to the extent of distorting the facts. When people become defensive, they never hear the feedback they are getting. As a result, little learning takes place. The effective use of the one minute reprimand with someone who makes a mistake should eliminate this defensive behavior.
The proper use of the one minute reprimand helps communicate important information necessary to get poor performance back on track.
Redirection
When people’s performance isn’t up to standards and they are still learning, redirection is more appropriate than a reprimand.
An effective redirection response has several key aspects:
• When people who are still learning do something wrong, the first thing you have to do is make sure they know that they have made a mistake or that a problem exists. Be specific. Share what happened clearly and without blame. For example, if a customer did not receive the correct order, the person responsible in the shipping department needs to know that.
• Second, the person being redirected needs to know the negative impact that the error caused. You might say, “One of our best customers was really upset. She needed that order for a sales presentation, and the fact that it didn’t arrive on time resulted in a less-than-stellar presentation.”
• Third, the manager in this situation, if appropriate, should take the blame for not making the task clear. Maybe the order was unclear. “It’s my responsibility that you get the best information possible so that you can do your job right.”
• Fourth, go over the task in detail, and make sure it is clearly understood. “To rally from this mistake, we need to overnight exactly what the customer ordered. If necessary, we might have to get someone to hand-deliver the order. We must do everything we can to make this situation right. Let’s double-check the order so that we’re all on the same page.”
• The final aspect of a redirection response is to express your continuing trust and confidence in the person. “I appreciate your enthusiasm and desire to learn. I still have confidence that you can be a standout in this department.”
As is evident, these steps are similar to the one minute reprimand. The big difference is that redirection focuses on teaching as the person is still learning, while the reprimand is focused on getting people back using the skills they already have. In both cases, the goal is not to tear people down, but to build them up in a way that they will return to top performance with a reprimand or continue to learn with redirection.
Praisings and Redirection Are Key to Partnering for Performance
The fourth step in partnering for performance is delivering the appropriate leadership style. Again, as a leader you are constantly looking for opportunities to move your leadership style forward so that you can eventually get to delegating. As people’s performance increases, praising their progress is key to supporting their efforts. If at any time their performance stalls or moves backward, rather than reprimanding or punishing them, the best strategy is to redirect and get them back on course. As managers manage by wandering around, it behooves them to praise progress and/or redirect. That is how you teach your people the right answers, so that when they get to the final exam—the performance review—they have the best opportunity to get an A.
Where does that leave reprimands? Again, reprimands can be helpful when performance is declining because of an attitude problem, not a skill problem. As we discussed in the last chapter, a reprimand can play a key role when decommitment is detected early.
The follow-up book to The One Minute Manager, Putting the One Minute Manager to Work, by Ken Blanchard and Robert Lorber, shows practicing managers how to apply the three secrets—one minute goals, one minute praisings, and one minute reprimands or redirection—to improve performance on an ongoing basis.8
The Fourth Secret of the One Minute Manager
Shortly after Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson’s The One Minute Manager came out, a top manager wrote to Ken and expressed how much he enjoyed the three secrets of the one minute manager. But he suggested that managers aren’t always right. He insisted that managers make mistakes all the time. “I think the fourth secret of the one minute manager should be the one minute apology,” he said.
That resonated with Ken, because his mother always said, “Two phrases that are not used enough in the world that could make it a better place are ‘Thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry.’” One minute praising covered thank you, but the three secrets didn’t cover I’m sorry. That’s when Ken and Margret McBride decided to write The Fourth Secret of the One Minute Manager: A Powerful Way to Make Things Better.9
The One Minute Apology
As with praisings, reprimands, and redirection, the one minute apology has several key aspects:
• A one minute apology begins with honesty. That starts with your being truthful and admitting to yourself that you’ve done something wrong and need to make up for it. The key here is a willingness to take full responsibility for your actions and any harm done to anyone else.
• A one minute apology ends with integrity. This involves recognizing that what you did or failed to do is wrong and inconsistent with who you want to be. It is important that you reaffirm that you are better than your poor behavior and forgive yourself.
• Once these two things are done, your focus has to be on making amends to that person for the harm you caused.
• Finally, commit to yourself and others not to repeat what you did wrong, and keep this commitment by changing your behavior.
What would an apology look like? Suppose at a meeting you kept interrupting a colleague, not permitting her to finish a thought. When another of your associates pointed this out after the meeting, you had a big aha, realizing that what you did was wrong and not beneficial to your team.
As soon as possible, go to the offended person and say something like, “I got some feedback about how I kept interrupting you at the meeting today and not letting you finish. I want to apologize, because I recognize the truth in that feedback, and I feel bad. That’s not who I want to be. In fact, I think I’m better than that. I promise I will never do that again. How can I make amends for what I did today?”
History would have been rewritten if President Nixon had quickly apologized for Watergate when what happened became clear. The same holds true for President Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky incident. When President Kennedy took full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs debacle, even the press didn’t have much more to talk about.
A one minute apology can be an effective way to correct a mistake you have made and restore the trust needed for a good relationship. Adding the one minute apology to goal setting, praising, reprimanding, and redirection makes partnering for performance a real give-and-take process where admitting your vulnerability can be more of a rule than an exception. Effective one-on-one leadership relationships depend on trust, and trust can occur only when we can get out of our own way and be authentic as we work with our people.
Are there other tools that can be applied to one-on-one relationships? Absolutely. In the next chapter, you’ll see how coaching can be used to develop people’s leadership skills.