5 Minute Manager Guides

What are they?

5 Minute Manager Guides are concise, quality, focused information on the essentials of a topic.

5 Minute Manager Guides are divided into 7 categories:

- 1:1 with People
- Motivation
- Performance
- Teams
- Recruitment
- Meetings
- General

Click on the category on the side bar on the right to see a list of titles under each category – more are added every month.

Under what circumstances do we see them being needed?

2 scenarios were in our minds when we conceived the idea for 5 Minute Guides. Others will come to your mind.

From our experience, these situations happen frequently:

1) Your boss has to be out of the office tomorrow. He only tells you at 4:30pm and he dumps onto you a task or a meeting from his diary. You have to take over and you know little about what you have to do. “Murphy’s Law” dictates that this always happens when you have a million other things on your mind and the least time to work on the new task.

You only have overnight to get the information you need. You need precise “how to” information and you need it NOW!

or

2) As the day is ending, (it’s always around 4:30pm !), your boss says “how about we meet at 8am tomorrow to discuss a new system of performance appraisal? I’m not happy with the one we have”.
You think “oh no, the only system I know is the one we’ve got. How can I intelligently discuss alternative systems without staying up all night doing the research to avoid the boss thinking I know nothing?”

You know you’ll have time to read up on it at the weekend but tonight, you need enough good quality information to get you started, enough for you to make an informed and intelligent contribution to the discussion in the morning and you need it now!.

How do we think you may use them?

Uses of 5 Minute Guides are as varied as the managers using them.

We think:

- sometimes just reading the information may be enough or you may
- write yourself even briefer notes as a crib sheet to take into a meeting.
- other times, such as if it’s interview questions you need, you may want to print the guide and take it to work with you