The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work

Three techniques from the best-selling management book, with the mechanisms that make them hold up

What are the three one-minute practices and why do they 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.

The One Minute Manager is one of the best-selling management books ever written. Its promise — that effective management can be compressed into one-minute practices — is partially literal and mostly rhetorical: the techniques take a minute each but require preparation, consistency, and genuineness to work. The three practices are deceptively simple: most managers nominally know them and almost none practice them with the specificity the framework demands. Below are the three practices with the mechanisms behind them and an honest read on where they hold up.