Ten years ago I published this article. One of the three secrets was already out of date, and I didn’t notice.
Maria-Jane Satterthwaite • Originally published July 2016 • Fully revised August 2026 • 7 minute read
Ten minutes before your shift starts. You’re standing somewhere out the back with a coffee that’s already going cold.
Someone on your team did something genuinely good yesterday; made a call under pressure, caught something before it became a problem, and you haven’t said a word about it. Someone else missed a step, and you’ve been rehearsing that conversation in your head the whole way in
That gap, between what you noticed and what you actually said, is where most frontline leadership lives or dies. Not in the strategy day. In the ten minutes before the shift.
Which is exactly the problem Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson set out to solve.
First, the bit I got wrong
In July 2016 I published a piece on The One Minute Manager. Three secrets: one minute goals, one minute praise, one minute reprimands. Set the expectation, catch people doing something right, and pull them up sharply when they get it wrong.
There was a problem with that article.
Blanchard had already retired the third secret. The New One Minute Manager was released in May 2015 — fourteen months before I hit publish — and the One Minute Reprimand had become the One Minute Re-Direct.
His reasoning is worth stating properly, because it is the whole argument: a reprimand is for someone who knows better than what they’re doing. A re-direct is for a learner. And with the pace of technical change, everyone is a learner now.
Goal setting changed too. In 1982 the manager set the goals and handed them down. In the 2015 version, you set them alongside your people. Blanchard’s word for it was partnership.
So I spent a decade teaching a version of a book that its own author had moved on from. Let’s fix that.
Secret one: the goal
Make sure a person knows what good looks like before they start. Not after, when it has already become a performance conversation.
What changed is who does the setting. The 1982 version handed goals down. The 2015 version sets them with the person doing the work, on the reasonable grounds that they usually know something about the job you don’t.
Watch the difference at a shift handover
THE OLD WAY
“Today we’re getting the handover done by 7.15.”
THE BETTER WAY
“We need handover done by 7.15 so the morning round isn’t chasing its tail all day. What’s going to get in the way of that?”
The second one costs you eleven extra seconds and surfaces the thing that would otherwise have eaten your morning. That’s the whole trade.
Three to five goals, kept where people can see them. Not agreed in January and filed until the review. Locke and Latham spent thirty-five years testing this and landed in the same place: specific, hard goals beat vague encouragement, but only once the person has actually accepted them as theirs (Locke & Latham, 2002). Which is an argument for setting goals together. Not for setting more of them.
Secret two: the praise
Catch people doing something right. Still the strongest of the three secrets, and still the one most leaders skip because it feels awkward and nothing broke.
The rules: say it immediately, say exactly what they did, say what it meant for the team or the customer, then stop talking for a second and let it land.
Specific beats warm. “Good job today, mate” tells someone you were in a decent mood. “The way you stepped in with that customer at the returns desk before it got loud, that’s the call I want every supervisor here making” tells them precisely what to do again.
Here’s the nuance the 1982 book didn’t have. Praise that describes what someone did lands very differently from praise that is obviously trying to extract more out of them. People can smell a lever. The research here is more precise than it is usually reported. Deci, Koestner and Ryan found that verbal recognition generally raises motivation; it is one of the few management moves that reliably does. What flips it is control. Praise a person reads as information about their work builds motivation; praise they read as a lever being pulled on them erodes it (Deci, Koestner & Ryan, 1999). Same words, different intent, opposite result.
And one line from the original has to go. The 1982 book suggested putting a hand on the shoulder to show you meant it. It was 1982. Don’t. The power was never in the shoulder; it was in the immediacy.
IN PRACTICE
“Priya, the way you saw the queue building and opened the second register before anyone had to ask. That’s the difference between a busy Saturday and a bad one. Exactly that. More of it.”
Secret three: the re-direct
This is the one I taught wrong, so let’s do it properly.
There is evidence underneath the change that Blanchard’s 1982 version simply didn’t have access to. In 1996, Kluger and DeNisi reviewed several hundred feedback studies and found something that ought to be on every leadership development slide deck: more than a third of feedback interventions made performance worse.
The pattern was consistent. Feedback that pointed at the task tended to help. Feedback that pointed at the person tended to hurt, because the person stops solving the problem and starts defending themselves.
Now re-read the 1982 reprimand script. It opens with “I’m disappointed.” That is a sentence about you, aimed at them. It is the exact move the research says backfires.
How a re-direct actually runs:
1. Get to it fast. Same shift if you can. A week later it’s an ambush.
2. Confirm the facts together. Not “you didn’t check that load properly” but “walk me through what happened at the dock.”
3. Name the gap and what it costs. Plainly. Short sentences. No sandwich.
4. Then back them, and mean it. Not as a softener at the end. Because if you didn’t think they could do the job, you’d be having a different conversation entirely.
5. When it’s over, it’s over. No callbacks in three weeks. This one rule from 1982 survives completely intact, and most leaders still break it.
IN PRACTICE
“Josh, park that for a sec, talk me through the load check on the outbound this morning.”
[Listens.]
“Right, so the strap check got skipped. That’s the step that stops a load shifting on someone at the other end, so I can’t have it missed. You’ve run that dock forty times clean. What do we do so it doesn’t happen again?”
The one exception. If someone knows exactly what to do and chose not to do it, that isn’t a learning gap and a re-direct won’t fix it. That is a different conversation, and it usually has a third person in the room.
The minute was never about the minute
The branding did the book a disservice. “One minute” sounds like a shortcut, and leaders who are already stretched hear it as permission to do less.
It isn’t a shortcut. The thing that makes it work isn’t brevity, it’s frequency and specificity. A sixty-second conversation you have four times a week beats a sixty-minute conversation you have twice a year, every single time. The minute isn’t a measure of how little you can get away with. It’s a measure of how small the unit can get before it stops being worth doing.
Which is precisely why it suits a frontline leader. You haven’t got an hour. You’ve got the walk from the back office to the floor.
That’s enough. If you use it on purpose.
If this feels adjacent to trust, that is because it is. Saying exactly what you saw, saying it straight, and owning it when you got it wrong are three of the thirteen behaviours in 13 Behaviours of High-Trust Leaders, which I revised this month for much the same reason I revised this one. That article is the principle. This one is what it looks like at 5:50am in the muster room.
Before your next shift
Pick one person. Pick one thing they did well this week. Tell them exactly what it was and exactly what it did for the team.
Sixty seconds. Then pay attention to what that person does the following week.
And if you’ve had my 2016 version bookmarked; it has been updated. The third secret is different now, and so am I.
TEAM ENGAGEMENT SOLUTIONS
A minute is enough. Finding the minute is the hard part.
Most leaders agree with all of this and still do none of it, because nobody ever built the habit into how the week actually runs. That is the work. Every solution is built around the team it is for, and people leave doing it rather than agreeing with it.
Enquire Now opens an email with a few questions already in it. If nothing happens when you click, your device has no mail app set up. Use See all solutions instead.
A note on the evidence
The One Minute Manager is a management parable, not a tested model, and it has never claimed otherwise. The research cited here, on goal setting, on feedback, on motivation, is separate peer-reviewed work that happens to support parts of it and complicate others. I have flagged which is which rather than borrowing academic weight the parable hasn't earned.
References
Blanchard, K. and Johnson, S. (1982) The One Minute Manager. New York: William Morrow.
Blanchard, K. and Johnson, S. (2015) The New One Minute Manager. New York: HarperCollins.
Deci, E.L., Koestner, R. and Ryan, R.M. (1999) 'A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation', Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), pp. 627-668.
Kluger, A.N. and DeNisi, A. (1996) 'The effects of feedback interventions on performance: a historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory', Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), pp. 254-284.
Locke, E.A. and Latham, G.P. (2002) 'Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation', American Psychologist, 57(9), pp. 705-717.
Cite this article
Satterthwaite, M-J. (2016) 'One Minute Management in Action!', Scope Blog, 14 July. Revised August 2026. Available at: https://scopevision.com.au/blog/one-minute-management-in-action (Accessed: [insert date]).
In text: (Satterthwaite, 2016).
Keep reading
- The Keys to Holding Great Coaching Conversations. The modern replacement for the retired Reprimand, and the gate that tells you which conversation you are actually in.
- The Value of Time. Where the minute comes from, and why it is the highest yield one on your calendar.
- 13 Behaviours of High-Trust Leaders. A Praising only lands if the person believes you meant it.
The whole idea here is that a minute is enough.
So is two seconds.
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And if someone came to mind while you were reading, send it to them. That is the better compliment.
