مدير يك دقيقه اي، مديريت ABC، سيستم PRICE

Putting the One Minute Manager to Work

By Kenneth Blanchard, PhD and Robert Lorber, PhD

The people we manage are our most important resources.  A One Minute Manager sets One Minute goals; gives One Minute Praisings; and delivers One Minute Reprimands.  [In} the ABC’s of management, A stands for activators.  Activators are those things that have to be done by a manager before someone can be expected to accomplish a goal.  B stands for behavior or performance.  It is what a person says or does.  C stand for consequences or what a manager does after someone accomplishes or attempts to accomplish a goal.

Goal setting is an activator.  You’re not in the management game unless your people are clear on their key areas of responsibility (accountability) and what good performance in each of those areas looks like (performance standards).  Goal setting is the most important activator for managers to remember, it starts the whole management process.  If One Minute Goal Setting is done properly, the desired performance is stated in behavioral terms-that is, it can be seen (observed and counted [measured]).  If you want people to stop doing something, give them a negative response like a One Minute Reprimand, if you want people to keep on doing something, or to improve or to learn something new, give them a positive consequence like a One Minute Praising.

Remember, you can effectively reprimand only winners because you can then end your negative feedback with a praising like: “You’re one of my best people-this recent performance is so unlike you.”  You can’t do that with people who are learning to perform and therefore have no past good performance history.  When people who are learning make a mistake.  Go back to goal setting and ante up again.
Reprimands do not teach skills, they can just change attitudes-there are five steps to training a learner to be a good performer:  Tell (what to do); Show (how to do); Then Let the person try; Observe performance; and Praise progress Or Redirect.  Generally, no response to good performance, like a negative consequence, tends to decrease the possibility of that performance being repeated.  If I’m going to manage my people, I’d better learn to manage consequences.  As a manager the important thing is not what happens when you are there, but what happens when you are not there.

You only reprimand when you know the person can do better, when you leave your people after a reprimand, you want them to be thinking about what they did wrong, not about the way you treated them.  When you end a reprimand with a praising people think about their behavior not your behavior.  The rule about the reprimand is that you only have thirty seconds to share your feelings, and when it’s over-it’s over.   Don’t keep beating on the person for the same mistake.  Pausing for a moment of silence in between sharing your feelings and the last part of the reprimand.  This permits you to calm down and at the same time lets the person you are reprimanding feel the intensity of your feelings.  If the person you are reprimanding starts to argue with you, “you stop what you are saying right then, and make it very clear to that person that this is not a discussion.  I am sharing my feelings about what you did wrong, and if you want to discuss it later, I will.  But for right now this is not a two-way discussion.  I am telling you how I feel.  If you start a reprimand with a praising, then you will ruin the impact of your praising. Because when you go to see a person just to praise him, “he will not hear your praising because he will be wondering when the other shoe will drop-what bad news will follow the good.”  So by keeping praising and reprimands in order, you will let your people hear both more clearly.

The activity trap, where people are running around trying to do things right before anyone has stopped to figure out the right things to do.  The PRICE system is the nuts and bolts of how to put the One Minute Manager to work and make a different every day in the performance and satisfaction of people on the job.  PINPOINT is the process of defining key performance areas for people in observable, measurable terms.  In essence, it is the performance areas that you would identify as One Minute Goals.  We need to stop mangers from saying things are good or bad, and get them to identify specifically what is happening.  RECORD, once you have pinpointed an area for improvement or a One Minute Goal, you want to be able to measure present performance and track progress in that area.  By recording or measuring performance, you attempt to make sure the need for improvement is real and not just a feeling.

The INVOLVE step, once you are aware improvement is needed, you share that information with whoever is responsible (accountable) for that area and /or can influence performance in it-graphs are not meant to be used as weapons, or as evidence in a managerial prosecution.  They are designed to be used as training tools as well as nonjudgmental methods of feedback.  Feedback is the breakfast of champions.  Always involve your people in establishing One Minute Goals.  One Minute  Management just doesn’t work unless you share it with your people.  Shared goals setting tends to get greater commitment from people and guarantees the setting of a realistic goal for the performance area.  A realistic goal is moderately difficult but achievable.  It’s acceptable to you as a manager and it’s possible for your people to accomplish.  You have to be specific about the number and the time frame.  When you set up a performance-improvement program with people, remember not to set the end-result goal.  As the goal that has to be reached before someone can feel a sense of accomplishment and deserve a praising; otherwise you might have to wait forever.

When working on performance, you need to set things up so you can catch people doing things approximately right (short-term goal), not exactly right (final goal).  The journey to exactly right is make up of a whole series of approximately rights.  Prior to actually coaching or evaluating performance, the consequences for goal accomplishment have to be agreed upon in the Involve (1) step of the PRICE system.  Observing behavior and giving feedback on results-both praising and reprimands, that’s when you began the ‘C’ or COACH step in PRICE.  Basic rule of feedback is that it should be immediate and specific.  Once the goal is set, feedback relates specifically to the goal.  As people improve, you want to gradually turn over to them more and more of the responsibility for monitoring their own performance.  In coaching you want to schedule fewer and fewer feedback meetings as people move gradually from their present level of performance to the desired level of performance.

Achieving good performance is a journey not a destination.  Coaching is a process of managing the journey.  EVALUATE (E), is the last step in the PRICE system.  Every time you give someone feedback you are evaluating.  A formal evaluation session, it is a way to formally recognize progress and a time to evaluate future strategies.  When you talk about evaluation in the PRICE system you are always trying to find out whether you are getting the desired results.  We find it more constructive to have people competing against themselves and a performance standard rather than competing with each other.

The best way to learn to be a One Minute Manager and to use what you have learned is to start to do it.  The important thing is not that you do it right, but that you get under way.
Anything worth doing does not have to be done perfectly at first.  Employees needed to know: what they were being asked to do (accountability system); what good behavior looked like (performance-data system); how well they were doing (feedback system); and what they would get for good performance (recognition system).