Canter Bridge

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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 circumstance 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.