The Managerial Moment of Truth:The Essential Step in Helping People Improve Performance

One of the harsh realities of life as a manager is that sometimes you have to be the bearer of bad news. When someone isn't performing up to your expectations, you're faced with a difficult choice. Do you tell the person what you really think? Will you risk discouraging him and degrade his performance even further? Or will telling the truth, clear the air, and make it possible to improve? 

There are few challenges in management that are more fundamental. Our summary of The Managerial Moment of Truth: The Essential Step in Helping People Improve Performance, by Bruce Bodaken and Robert Fritz, introduces a process for dealing with this challenge and changing the way people work together, think together, and create their future together. 

The authors have evolved this simple yet effective process through years of shared managerial experience. Bodaken is chairman, president, and CEO of Blue Shield of California, a 3.3 million-member health plan. Fritz is the author of the best selling book The Path of Least Resistance and pioneered the field of “structural dynamics” in the area of the creative process as well as in deal with business and management issues. 

When managers use this process, they can dramatically improve performance and increase productivity, at no cost, in virtually any organization. For example, at Blue Shield of California, more than 1,000 managers have been trained in this approach, with impressive, measurable results, helping the company become one of the fastest-growing health care plans in the state.

Other companies, all at the top of their industries, are now using it with great success. Once you've absorbed the ideas in this summary, you'll know how to use it to transform your business too.