The one minute manager review: how to better manage your time and your team

One of the top productivity books to manage your time:The one minute manager.

I read the one minute manager books in my early managing days. At that time, I was overhelmed by what I had to do and was deeply looking for help to manage my time and my team. During this period, I came across a lot of books for productivity. Needless to say, a large part of them were useless. The one minute manager is definitely not in this category. Every would be / new born manager should read it. Every accomplished manager, feel free to comment and add your experience. The one minute manager is one of the few productivity books that really helps you manage your time and your team. Altough written in a simplistic vision of what a manager should be, it is still a very efficient way of dealing with a common mistake for would-be managers: efficient delegation. Basically, you could summarize a good delegation process by: – 1 mn goal setting – 1 mn praising if a member of your team is doing good – 1 mn reprimand if a member of your team is doing wrong. Yes, I know, you’re thinking: what, so much for an advice ! But actually, behind those simplistic ideas, lies a great deal of being a manager. A manager stop “doing” himself to teach and help people “do” themselves by leveraging key elements: – Communication – Feedback – Autonomy   1- Communication Some say that gaining time is sometimes a matter of loosing some in the first place. I’d rather say that gaining time is a matter of investing some of yours at the beginning. Indeed, when delegating, gaining time is just about that: invest time in making sure the person in front of you understand exactly what you want and that she can, given it’s own cultural background ( education / civilization / religious … think international and you’ll see what I mean), clearly understand and rephrase your goal. If you skip this part, you’re dead and don’t even consider blaming your team ! That’s most of the time how you end-up with overdue project, badly executed projects / actions. The one minute manager, besides the 1mn goal setting ( the good communication), taught me a very important rule that I’ve been following since then: always set your team’s goals before tackling ANY of your action: it works for any timeframe you look at it, daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. Why ? because It relieves stress on you: First everybody on the team has its goal set and knows what to do, not needing your advice or inputs to get things done. Second, this way, other things gets done while you do something on your side. If you would do it the other way around: no more human “grid” computing ability. And Third, if you’re smart enough ( hint: joke !), you should set goals that actually reduce your current To-Do list so that when you’re done with setting goals, you don’t have any action points attributed to yourself  … What ? so you’re a manager and you end up having no action points ? yes that’s right 🙂 BECAUSE IT’S NOT MY JOB TO DO BUT IT IS MY JOB TO HELP OTHERS DO. See following part to understand why. 2- Feedback Before I get into the next two parts, let me explain my previous statements. I’m sure that many of you know or have been experiencing the BUSY manager, the one that actually do something, probably all day long. Most of the time, those managers are unreachable, you have to book 1 week in advance a timeslot in their schedule, and even when you actually have a meeting with them, you feel like they are stressed and not focused on your problem. Root cause of this behavior: they’re as stressed as you are because they actually have to deliver some actions themselves and they’re probably on the critical path of many member of the team, slowing everybody. That’s why a manager’s goal is to stay as free as possible: to actually be able to help team members achieve their goal. I’ve been there in the past, I know exactly how everybody is feeling in this situation. Wrong way to do things.* Ok, back to feedback. It’s essential that you give fair and measurable feedback to every member of your team. It’s their only way to actually understand what they’re doing good and what they’re doing poorly. And you should do so because you invest and manage your time for your team to help them get better at their job so that the team can be more efficient. The one minute manager books provides some analogies, you’ll read them. But basically, what it says is: nobody ever played tennis like Sempras or soccer like Pele just because they knew it from day one. They’ve been taught, trained and were given feedback on what they were doing good and what they should improve in their game. As simple as that.   3- Autonomy Last but not least, delegation is also about learning your team members to gain autonomy, certainly not about control. One of your goal should be to move from control freak to coach. The more you coach the better the team, the more you control, the more stress you’ll experience. One interesting way that The One Minute Manager highlights is the “questioning” gimmick’. What does it mean ? Well, most of the time, after you’ve gained some experience, when one of your team member comes in for a problem and ask for advice, you’ll be finding the solution for them … At the beginning, it can be very efficient since you can find it probably way faster than your team member, but in the end, it’ll cost you a lot of time: your team member is relying on you to solve his problem and you’re again the bottleneck. “Questioning” is all about asking questions to your team, to which you probably already have the answers. But by asking the right questions, you gain several benefits: – you help them figure out by themselves a solution and help them grow in autonomy – believe it or not, but people feel way more confident implementing their solution than the one you provided them with This is actually quite efficient and help you with being pedagog rather than assertive . Have a nice reading.   * I have to admit I did not completely figured out how to be as free as I wished, but now mostly because of “mandatory” meetings that the any organization is requiring executives to attend to. That will be the topic of another post. The iPad app that we developed,Beesy, has been designed witch exactly this goal in mind: make sure you have time to spend on defining priorities for people and you can manage yours in the simplest way that is possible. Indeed, Beesy is a business tool to manage your time day-to-day to achieve your priorites.