Coaching practices for The One Minute Manager Three Practices That Still Work with Friends

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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • My check-ins with people are rare and long, and by the time we sit down so much has piled up that the meeting feels heavy and high-stakes
  • My whole attention as a manager is tuned to what’s broken
  • When someone does something genuinely great I tend to file it away to mention at their review, and by the time it comes around it’s gone cold and vague
  • My team and I keep ending up at cross purposes
  • I keep getting frustrated that people aren’t hitting the bar

Practices that may help

  1. The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
    Blanchard and Johnson’s One Minute Manager distills management to three practices: one-minute goals (clear, written, short), one-minute praisings (specific, immediate, genuine), and one-minute reprimands (immediate, behavior-specific, followed by reaffirmation). The framework is a 1982 practitioner classic, not a clinical protocol, but the mechanisms — specificity in feedback, timeliness, and the separation of behavior from character — are supported by decades of subsequent research in reinforcement and feedback theory.
  2. Use brief, frequent touch-points rather than long, rare meetings
    Frequent short feedback loops beat rare long reviews because the gap between behavior and feedback is what determines whether feedback changes anything.
    The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
  3. Catch people doing things right
    Most management attention goes to problems — systematically noticing good work is both rarer and more powerful.
    The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
  4. One-minute praisings: specific, immediate, genuine
    Praise that names the exact behavior immediately after it occurs reinforces that behavior far more effectively than delayed or generic recognition.
    The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
  5. One-minute goals: write them short enough to re-read in a minute
    A goal that cannot be stated on a single page is too vague to be evaluated or acted on.
    The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
  6. Agree in advance on what good performance looks like
    Performance conversations go badly because the standard was never made explicit — the reprimand is the first time it is stated.
    The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
  7. Join a small accountability group
    Report to a small group rather than one person to add redundancy and social proof.
    Accountability Partners
  8. Effective One-on-Ones, Made Practical
    An effective one-on-one is a recurring, protected meeting that belongs to your report: they own the agenda, and your job is to listen, unblock, and support their growth — not to run a status update. The relational mechanisms (regular contact, voice, support) are well grounded; the specific cadence and format are practitioner craft built on top of them.
  9. Let the report own the agenda
    It’s their meeting — they bring what matters to them, and you adapt to it.
    Effective One-on-Ones, Made Practical
  10. Create thinking space rather than filling every meeting with content
    The most valuable thing a coaching manager provides is protected time and space for reflection — which most teams never get.
    The Leader as Coach: A New Management Paradigm

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