توضیحات ای جی

BEC : Management -AJ

Hey, this is AJ. Welcome to my commentary talking more about management. So I guess I’ll start first by talking some more about The One Minute Manager. It’s a great book to go out and get. If you can find an audio book of it I recommend that you get the audio book too and then you can listen to the audio and read the text of the book at the same time, which is a great way to practice English.

That’s a great way in general is to use audio books plus the regular book and then you can listen and read along at the same time. It’s very good. So that’s a really good one because it uses very simple English. All the ideas are very simple. It’s short. So it’s a great management book to get and to use for practicing English and just for learning some really basic management skills.

Again, the three parts of that book are, number one, he calls it ‘one minute goal setting’.

His whole idea is this idea of one minute, meaning very quick, very simple. The idea though is basically that you need to have goals. So when you’re a manager you need to make sure that everyone is clear about the goals. This is one the big problems you’ve probably experienced as a worker sometimes is that you’re not clear what you’re supposed to be doing. I mean you have your general duties, but sometimes you’re not sure which are the most important ones and which are not the most important ones and what are the actual goals. What are you trying to accomplish.

I’ll give you an example. I worked at a bookstore one time. I worked at the cash register and I knew my job was to take money. That was about it though. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. Were they trying to stress that I would be really friendly or instead did they want me to go very quickly. It was never really clear and sometimes they would yell at me for one or complain about something else. You’re not going fast enough or you’re not talking enough to the customers. It was never clear. That’s going to cause a lot of problems if the goals aren’t clear.

So you have the goals of your group, your organization, your team, whatever it is and then you have to actually break that into individual goals for each of your team members - your people - so you want to sit down with them. The idea of this one minute goal setting idea, the basic idea is that you keep it simple, so one page only. No more than one page and you make the goals very specific. Then finally, of course, you choose the things which are most important, the highest priority.

The person working under you or with you there may be 20 or 30 things they’re supposed to do, so you need to identify what are the key ones, the key one, two or three things that are really, really the highest priority and turn them into goals for that person and, ideally, make them measurable goals. In other words, you know when the goal has been achieved. So maybe it’s finish this project by this date or increase your sales by $1,000 this month, whatever it is, but just make it specific.

Then you’ll sit down with that person and in writing you’ll go over the goals. You’ll discuss the goals with them. You’ll show them. You can even have them sign them and you sign them if you want if you really want to make it official, if it’s a more formal kind of setting. That way they’re clear about exactly what you expect and what they should focus on and then you’re clear about what you’re asking them. It just makes things clear and that makes everybody kind of feel better and they really know what they’re supposed to be doing.

The next part is the idea of ‘catching people doing things right’. Ken Blanchard calls it ‘one minute praising’. The key thing about this is that it really needs to be specific. So if you praise somebody, if you catch them dong something right, if you see them do a good job on something, some small little thing, of course you tell them that was a great job, but if you just say good job in a general way it’s not so powerful. Sometimes it starts sounding like you’re not really sincere. You’re just always saying good job. Great job! Great job! Great job! It’s just meaningless.

So when you praise someone it really has to be specific. You have to tell them exactly what they did well and why you’re pleased with it. So you might say something more specific like good job on your presentation at the meeting. You were very clear and direct. You were very persuasive with your presentation. Good job. I like that. See, that’s the kind of praise that is specific and that’s more meaningful to the person because they know exactly what they did well.

When you say something like to them you’re reinforcing it. You’re strengthening it, right? You’re making something they did well stronger. Next time they make a presentation that’s going to be in their head and they’re going to remember. My manager really liked it when I was strong and direct and persuasive. They’re likely to become stronger and more direct and more persuasive in their presentations. That’s just how it works. So whenever you give any kind of praise, always be very specific about what it is you liked.

I’ll give another example of this, the Dale Carnegie Speech Course, which is the first public speaking course I took. They use exactly this same approach, so when the students give speeches they never ever, ever, never criticize them. They never tell them what they did wrong or they never say anything that they did bad. They only focus on the strengths, so they’ll give very specific praise.

So even if someone was very nervous, they’ll say I liked the way that you stood there and continued looking at the audience. Even when you were forgetting what you wanted to say, you continued looking at everyone. That’s just an example, for example. So what are they doing? They’re focusing on the strengths and they’re praising them very specifically. The whole point of all of this is to build confidence, build confidence.

So you have different kinds of managers or supervisors out there. One kind likes to build up their own ego. So they’re like I’m the boss! I’m the boss! You know we’ve all had these kinds of managers. They’re always looking out for themselves and building up their own power and ego and usually the people who work for them hate them.

Sometimes these people can get good results from their team through fear and intimidation; however, it usually backfires. Meaning it usually products a negative result in the end because over time people tend to hate and resent. ‘Resent’ meaning they hold negative feelings for a long time against that kind of manager. I’ve done this many times as an employee.

If you hate your manager, you’ll do the minimum amount of work possible usually. You’ll do just enough so that they don’t yell at you, but you certainly will not do a lot of extra work and try to be a great, wonderful, incredible performer for them or the team because you don’t like them. You don’t want to do well for them. You don’t want to help them.

So being the big boss and yelling at people makes people feel strong. Those guys often don’t go really high in the company. I mean sometimes they do, it depends on the company. It’s just a miserable way to live anyway, so don’t be one of those people.

Another kind of manager, much better in my opinion, are managers who make their team members stronger. They feel more confident so they’re constantly building their team members, making them stronger, making them more confident, helping them to perform better and better and better and better.

You see this all the time. The best managers in soccer, in football, for example, this is what they do, right? They make their players stronger and more confident. They may yell at their players some times, especially the veterans, the ones that are already top performers to push them a little bit and we’ll talk about how to do that in a minute, but they, generally, are always focused on making the players better. It’s not about them.

They know the players have to perform well and feel strong and confident in order for them to be successful as managers.

That’s the whole point of this catching people doing things right. It’s especially important with new people, people whose confidence might be low. If someone’s confidence is low, you constantly need to be catching them doing things right and give them very specific praise.

Another way to do this is to tell success stories to your team. So if one person on the team does a great job, you can tell them directly good job and tell them exactly why and be very specific. You can also then tell their story - their accomplishment - to other people in the team. You could say wow! That person did a great job. I’m really impressed. They did this, this and this.

You could maybe discuss it in a meeting; again, being very, very specific. By doing that you’re sending a message to everybody this is what I want. This is exactly the kind of work or behavior that I want. So it’s a very positive way to show people what you want and to reinforce - to strengthen --the kinds of actions that you want.

Finally, the third part of Ken Blanchard’s little formula he called ‘one minute corrections’.

A ‘correction’ means a change. So he didn’t call it punishment, he called it a correction.

The idea is that someone does something that’s not up to par. They do something that’s not quite right. They didn’t get it right. It wasn’t good enough or they did something that caused a big problem.

Now, there are two approaches to this. With someone who’s kind of new and they have low confidence and they’re not really sure what they’re doing, they’re still kind of learning, you don’t want to yell at them or criticize them because they’re just learning.

So don’t punish failure, that’s a terrible thing to do. Don’t punish failure. There’s a great Tom Peters quote. I can’t remember exactly. It’s ‘reward audacious failures’, something like that. ‘Audacious’ means like very bold. In other words, you don’t want people to be afraid of making mistakes because mistakes always happen.

If they’re always afraid of making mistakes then they’ll never take risks. They’ll never try anything interesting or different or great and you’ll just kind of get mediocre results. So especially when people are newer, don’t yell at them for making a mistake. You just talk to them about it and say well, that didn’t work out very well. Here’s what you might try instead. You know give them some kind of positive encouragement.

The only people that you “correct”, that you’re going to maybe express unhappiness with, are people who maybe show a really bad attitude, something like that. You have to deal with that certainly, but otherwise it’s mostly your kind of high performers, the veterans; the people who are already quite confident. They can handle a little bit of useful criticism. They can handle direction. Sometimes those kinds of people like to be pushed a little bit. They like to be challenged.

You have to know the personality of the people you’re dealing with. Some people hate to be criticized and you really have to be careful how you do it. Others, if they’re really high performers and they’re already super confident, well then if they do something that’s not great then you can have a meeting with them and say you know that wasn’t great. That’s not really what I’m looking for, but then, again, you end with some specific praise. You say usually you’re a top performer. You’re always doing a great job. You’re always on time and very motivated. I know you can get this changed.

In other words, you just have to be careful how you use criticism. You always want to do it in a positive way so you’re pointing out something that’s not great, but then you’re also pointing out that this person normally is quite good and that you’re confident in them and you know they’re going to change things. You might then talk about specifically how they can make changes.

So you can be tougher and tougher and tougher on people who are at the top who are already very confident. The more confident someone is, the higher performer they are, the more they can handle discussing times when they make mistakes. If they’re kind of more fragile, kind of new and their confidence is low, you have to be very careful about that.

That’s the really basic idea. I mean, again, there are thousands, tens of thousands, millions of management books out there. So go out there and you can read lots and lots of them. If you get a management job it’s something you can study for a long time. This is just a basic approach that you can start with. You can even do this as a team member. You don’t have to be an official manager. Just as a member on a team you could do some of these things in an informal way, in a more relaxed way.

You can still praise your team members, for example, for specific accomplishment, for things they do well. That’s a great habit to be in. Your team members will love you for it.

You can still help to create goals for yourself and even for your team members. You can do a lot of these things on your own.

So this is a very simple approach to management and because it’s simple it’s easy to follow, so give it a try.

Okay, we’ll see you again. Bye-bye.

The End.