Why Every Manager Badly Underestimates How Long People Management Actually Takes
Most managers budget ten minutes per person per month for reviews. I watched one conversation take ninety. Here is why genuine people management has an irreducible minimum — and what to do about it.
{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","headline":"Why Every Manager Badly Underestimates How Long People Management Actually Takes","description":"Most managers budget ten minutes per person for reviews. I watched one conversation take ninety. Discover why genuine people management has an irreducible minimum time cost — and how to plan for it.","image":"https://avinash-gallery-worker.avinashchate-abc.workers.dev/avinash-1775992367334-695bq7.webp","keywords":"people management time, manager time management India, corporate training Pune, leadership training India, time management for managers, employee review time, Avinash Chate, The Winning Edge","articleSection":"Leadership, Corporate Training","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Avinash Chate","jobTitle":"Founder & Director, The Future Corporate","sameAs":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/avinashchate","https://www.youtube.com/@AvinashChate"]},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Avinash Chate","url":"https://avinashchate.com"},"datePublished":"2026-06-28","inLanguage":"en"} There is a planning mistake I see repeated in almost every organisation I train across Pune, Mumbai and Maharashtra — and it costs companies far more than they realise. Managers sit down with a calendar, divide the number of people on their team by the hours in a month, and arrive at a tidy number: perhaps ten minutes per person for a performance review, or fifteen for a one-on-one check-in. The spreadsheet looks clean. The schedule looks manageable. And then reality arrives. In my book The Winning Edge, The Champion Mindset , I dedicate a significant portion of the chapter on time management to what I call the irreducible minimum of people management — the floor below which you simply cannot compress the time genuine human leadership demands. This is not a soft idea. It is a structural fact about how human beings function, and ignoring it is one of the primary reasons managers in India and around the world consistently feel overwhelmed, their teams feel unseen, and performance reviews become a checkbox exercise that produces no real change. Let me tell you about a story from one of my client organisations that captures this perfectly — and then let us work through what every manager needs to understand about time, people, and the hidden cost of underestimation. The Story of Mr Nitin: When the Numbers Did Not Add Up One of my client organisations decided, correctly, that monthly performance reviews were the right way to keep a sixty-person team aligned and growing. The MD, Mr Nitin, was a sharp, well-intentioned leader who genuinely cared about his people. The plan seemed straightforward: sixty people, ten minutes each per month. That is six hundred minutes — ten hours — perfectly manageable across a working month. Then the first review session began. The first candidate sat down. By the time that single conversation ended, ninety minutes had passed. Not because the employee was difficult. Not because the man…
← Back to all articles · Book Avinash Chate
By Avinash Chate — Maharashtra’s #1 Corporate Trainer & Motivational Speaker. .