The One Minute Manager summary

If you distilled the job of a manager down to its very essence, what would you say it was? Controlling a company’s finances? Developing new products? Selling goods?

Actually, the answer lies in the job title: the main task of a manager is to manage the company’s employees.

The purpose of the company is to deliver good financial results, but those figures depend wholly on the efforts of the employees. The quality of their work is the main driver behind creating and selling high-quality products, and thus the company’s success.

This makes the employees the most essential capital that a company can own, and so managers need to focus on maximizing their potential.

Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case: even though companies typically spend up to 70 percent of their budget on salaries, most don’t invest even one percent in training their employees. This demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding.

Most managers don’t understand the connection between their employees and financial results, which is why they tend to fall into two camps:

First, there are managers who care greatly about the well-being of their employees, and unwittingly sacrifice the company’s performance to keep them happy. These managers would never dare tell an employee that he or she is doing something wrong, and would rather take on almost all of the work themselves. In the long run, this ends in disaster.

Second, there are harsher managers who only care about the performance the company delivers, and are even willing to override any consideration for their employees to improve it. These managers are constantly telling their employees that they are not doing enough and need to improve, and this saps their motivation.

Of course, you really want to be at the cross-section of these two categories, where your employees feel good about working for you, but also deliver high-quality results.

So how can you get there? By taking just one minute to manage your employees! Read on to learn how this can be done, and how it will both increase company efficiency and save you time.