Book Review | One minute manager meets the monkey
In this blog, I will summarise topics from the book, The one minute manager meets the monkey.
The One minute manager meets the monkey is written by Ken Blanchard, William Oncken JR and Hal Burrows.
The book is about, how to free up your time as a manager to deal with priorities.
As per the book, the one minute manager is a symbol, intending to remind each of us to take a minute out of our day to look into the faces of the people we manage and to realise that they are our most important resources.
In this blog, I will provide the summary about the book.
The Problem
The book starts off with the problem that the manager end up making. And it mentions that most of the time it is self inflicted.
Due to the mistakes, the workload of managers increases so much that they feel, they are doing work of 2 or more.
As per the book, these kind of managers are referred as indispensable manager and they are termed dangers by the higher management.
Since, such managers are always doing more work than the team members, they cannot get promoted as there is nobody else in the team who can become their successor.
The book then provides many examples on how a manager end up taking on work load of the team members and how such managers struggle to keep up.
The monkey
The book refers the monkey as action items that must be performed by team members under manager’s supervision.
If these monkey’s are not managed correctly then a manager end up getting managed by the team members rather than managing the team.
The book suggests the monkeys are not always problems but could also be opportunities.
The book provides various examples about how to manage the monkeys correctly.
The solution
As a solution, the book provides a Oncken’s rules of Monkey management. The rule suggest that any conversation between the manager and the team member should not end until,
1. the next steps are identified,
2. a owner is assigned to next steps
3. dependencies and risks are identified and discussed
4. a cadence is set up for follow-ups.
As per the book, with the help of above rules, the monkeys always stays with the rightful owner. Due to this, a manager can focus on strategic things and team member can focus on their responsibilities or monkeys.
The book closes off, by talking about coaching and delegation. The book suggests before any manager can delegate the work, the team members should be coached, so that they are confident to take on the complete responsibilities of a project.
The coaching occurs when the monkeys are with the rightful owner and each team member become accountable for it.
Conclusion
The one minute manager meets the monkey is a great read which reminds every manager on how to handle the team effectively and get time for strategic items.
The book provides examples on various situations which every manager can relate to.
The book teaches, how to save time for what managers actually must do, with humour and logic.
I urge all managers to read the book in detail to effectively manage your team.
Happy reading and Happy management!
