Customer Reviews

Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Increasing Effectiveness Through Situational Leadership

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I prefer this book to the One Minute Manger because it has the same basic concepts but deals with situational leadership, which is what most managers truly face. There are three simple precepts, which the One Minute Manager establishes with his employees: One Minute Goal Setting, One Minute Praisings, and One Minute Reprimands (just as in the original One Minute Manager).

1. Starting with goals that are clear to both the manager and the people who will help accomplish them. Goal setting is all about making sure employees understand perfectly what their duties are, what is expected of them and that there are no surprises.

2. The manager should work with his/her people to diagnose their "competence" and "commitment" to accomplish those goals.

3. Decide what management style is most appropriate for the individual

4. Following through and provide reprimands or praisings based on that adopted style. The Praisings and Reprimands are simply managers acknowledging that the employees are doing there jobs or not and how to deal with the situation and how to convey it to the employee.

As always, I was quite stunned to find the content extremely useful and extremely simplistic. For those seeking to find additional leadership books I recommend How to Become CEO by Jeffrey Fox and two books by John Maxwell, Power of Leadership and The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader.

Don't let the title or the number of pages fool you. This small volume packs substance. Situational management was not a fad. As recently as 1999, Peter Drucker (in his book "Management Challengers for the 21st Century") emphasized that despite the apparent hunger for learning "the one best way to manage, one such method does not exist." Producing desirable results is the goal of management; how to manage varies tremendously according to differences in situations.

This book goes well beyond espousing the idea of "different strokes for different folks." Becoming a situational leader involves:

1. Starting with goals that are clear to both the manager and the people who will help accomplish them.

2. Working with her people to diagnose their "competence" and "commitment" to accomplish those goals. Diagnosis preceds effective management methods.

3. Contracting with each person on each of the tasks and jointly deciding which leadership style will likely be most effective.

4. Following through to provide the agreed-upon leadership style until either (i) enough progress or (ii) lack of suitable progress warrants a change in leadership style.

The book presents a practical model for diagnosing each person's level of development with regard to achieving each major goal.

One other note: Despite its "leadership" title, the book addresses one-on-one supervision methods. If you're looking for a book that addresses how to create and sustain a "vision" that will drive your organization forward, this is not that book. It is, however, the most practical presentation of situational management that I've read.

Dr. Ken Blanchard is indeed the master of Situational Leadership. He and Hershey were the great inventors of Situational Leadership I. They had something great going then. Now, Situational Leadership II is fully on the scene and it is catching on everywhere. From major corporations to the Lady Volunteers of Tennessee, everyone is successfully using Situational Leadership to manage their people. This book tells you how to do it the right way. When situational leadership is done correctly, your people will love you for it. You can also use situational leadership at home with your wife and kids. If you are a manager, you MUST have this book. You can't effectively manage or lead without it. Remember, when you undersupervise you frustrate yourself. When you oversupervise, you frustrate others. Situational leadership is simply providing for subordinate what they cannot provide for themselves. Dr. Blanchard's book will tell you how to do it! As U.S. Air Force instructor, I have taught this theory using this book to over 450 managers per year. All of them have praised this book and Blanchard/Hershey's theory.

This book shows you how to becoming a situational leader by:

1. Crystallizing goals that are clear to both the manager and the people involved.

2. Participating together to examine "competence" and "commitment" to accomplish those goals.

3. Contracting with each employee about the tasks at hand and jointly agreeing which leadership style will likely be most effective. This is Optimal Thinking, the mental software needed to optimize performance.

4. Following through to provide the agreed-upon leadership style until feedback suggests another option.

The book provides a realistic roadmap for diagnosing each employee's status in relation to important goals.

This book provides a practical roadmap for the leader. Read it and read Optimal Thinking: How to Be Your Best Self to learn how to optimize your thinking, be your best, bring out the best in others and create the best results. This is a 10-star combination!

Leadership is the key trait of any manager to handle the business of managing. Lots of theories were proposed and lot of literature has been produced on leadership styles. Here is a refreshing and down to earth proposal of situational leadership. It is a synthesis of major leadership styles already proposed. Use right leadership style with right people - different strokes to different people is the key proposal of this book. This book also proposes evolutionary nature of people at work and thus change of leadership style with the same person at different situations and evolutionary levels. The proposal of not treating unequals as equals for any reason is very sound and practical and thus makes this theory adoptable in any situation. Written in simple but very clear style, this book is a must read for everybody - whether in the business of managing or not because it can be adopted to any basic human interaction for getting right responses. It is of great help anyway for those people who are in the business of managing.

This is an excellent book on situational leadership. It outlines what would seem to be a simple process to becoming a situational leader. The examples given are relevant and the book was very easy to read. The most valuable concept I learned from the book was the concept of "different strokes for the same folks," meaning that you can use different leadership styles with the same person depending on the task at hand. The only thing I didn't really care for about this book was the way in which it was written. The whole book consists of conversations between "the entrepreneur," the "one minute manager," and the subordinates of the one minute manager. It was kind of cheesy at some times, but it got the point across loud and clear.

This is a step by step journey from Management to Situational Leadership. You will read it again and again as you move forward in your career and face new challenges with new teams, new direct reports and new bosses. This is also an excellent present for some one that is facing a management position for the first time.

This entry in Ken Blanchard's One Minute Manager Library uses the narrative style that has for better or worse become standard in business literature to teach `situational leadership' in terms of flexibility, diagnosis, and partnering.

Blanchard's style tends toward the simple rather than the complicated side of the leadership menu and so his popular books are short and broken into bite-sized chapters, usually based upon one of his trademark sayings.

The `situational' in `situational leadership' means that Blanchard wants to coach a leader who can vary his style based upon the situation he encounters. The idea is not to produce an automaton of managerial efficiency, but rather a human being who is wise. This latter aspect of his program may have increased in recent years. The book under review dates from 1985, but wisdom under other names is already a desirable feature, even if it emerges at this early date more as a technical ability than a character virtue.

I find this little entry to be a refreshing reminder to step back and understand the human being whom one is `managing' when much of my leadership reading focuses--properly, I think--on the person of the leader. Blanchard reminds us between the lines of Leadership and the One Minute Manager that we manage human beings and that we do so for some reason larger than ourselves. Their competence and attitude vary from week to week and from task and so, therefore, should our managerial interaction with them.

That alone is worth the read.

I am a fan of the One Minute Manager series, having read "The One Minute Manager" and the "The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey." This book tells the story of an "entrepreneur" who seeks advice from the One Minute Manager. In the process, it covers the basics of situational leadership in a concise, easy to read style. The text covers the four basic leadership styles -- directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating. It also discusses matching a leadership style appropriate for various development levels. Like the other One Manager Manager books, I see myself re-reading and referencing this text. Highly recommended.

Everbody allways agree on the lack of people management skills received in any college/executive education. In fact, managing people is like being a father.. nobody tells you how, you have to learn by experience.. But, with this book, you really get the point straight about managing people and being a real leader. I really recommend its reading and its inmediate application.