Agenda (1–1s)

For the impatient, glance at the the key takeouts at the bottom. 😉

Grounding your 1–1 behavior

The agenda is the 1–1 structure that will ground the behavior during the 1–1s. This way you gain most in the spent time.

When discussing an item we tend to fill all the time with that item if nothing else to talk about. This might make you both miss something important, prevent you talking about appropriate subjects and sufficiently. When you have a list, it is easier to roughly estimate how much time you would need for each item.

All of us have a natural tendency towards a certain area of 1–1s. This can be because of your character (something practiced unconsciously most of your life), or something you practiced within your career. You might be good in other areas, but the practiced behavior turned into a reflex. This will make it comfortable for you to talk about certain areas and not others. Having an agenda will give you a check on that tendency, and it will be up to you to push yourself in the other direction out of your comfort zone. One of my natural strengths lies within people management, and coaching. I like to help people so it is naturally easier for me to engage them in this area. This is why I used to push myself in other areas till I felt a balance. The agenda helped with this.

Always have an agenda.

All engineering managers (from the resources) agree on this, except maybe Camile in “The Catch-up” type of 1–1¹ explains that when possible, she would do fluid natural meetings without agenda ahead, in order to let her direct reports drive the conversation. To her, this introduces creativity, but then goes on to say that it “can turn into a complaining session or therapy” and you need to “prevent unchecked long conversations”¹.

I would maybe do the first one or two as fluid meetings, to allow for getting out whatever they feel like discussing if it feels cold to them having an agenda. Another time for fluid meetings is perhaps after a long time coworking within a company as an experienced engineering manager with the other person, since this is the only time you will get a sixth sense on whether the 1–1 is lacking something. Otherwise, always have an agenda. I can be flexible with the agenda, but it is there to ground us both.

Shareable document

Having one will reduce maintenance of two separate lists instead of one, increase collaboration and find misalignments, increase transparency, between you and if agreed and needed with others as well. Each time you need to recollect something that you talked about, to summarize on the key takeaways and action points at the end of each meeting, the shareable document will be there for you.

I personally use workflowy but you can choose the application for the format and functionality to suit you both (google docs e.t.c.).

Who enters items in the agenda?

As it’s in the best interest of employees to discuss 1–1 subjects that they are interested in, in order to grow and keep on succeeding, I believe they are mostly responsible for adding items.

Once it is understood what goes in the agenda and what doesn’t, the employee will add those 1–1 items properly. If they are not adding 1–1 items, then try to inspect whether that item has some 1–1 aspects that can be talked about. Otherwise keep explaining that these non1–1 items either belong to another ceremony or belong outside of the scope of the business.

The manager also supplements the agenda with items that reflect that person from a 1–1 standpoint. Perhaps someone approached you, the manager, for good or bad feedback for the employee, or you heard some challenges regarding the project they are working on or team or organization they are leading. Usually I add items seldom or whenever needed.

Camile¹ has this approach. James is a bit more forthcoming “they and you need to enter, in the shared doc”³ , but then hints “their meeting, not yours” in another section, so you can probably tweak this slightly depending on the organizational setting, your ways, and the employee’s needs.

If possible, instill a habit for yourself and the employee, of adding the items during the week instead of right before the meeting starts. This way, you would not require to remember a lot, and the only thing left prior to the meeting will be prioritizing the items.

Topics

I divide the topics in the high level categories below.

People problems

Being complex creatures, interpersonal problems are a vast topic. When it comes to what the employee can do usually what helps is guided questions around seeing other perspectives, making someone conscious about something, making them understand another colleague/stakeholder. You will sometimes need to discuss the employee’s interpersonal issues with another person in order to help them forward.

Planning

Are there deadlines? Are we on track with the schedule? Are there impactful items with small effort that can help us reach the deadline? If not, is there something we can scope out?

Giving Feedback

Understand how the person wants to receive good and bad feedback (so it is most effective) and apply it. Don’t forget to praise them when they have done something positive. As humans, in order to survive, we become wired towards the negative (we can spot it easily), so it is important to check whether you give enough praise. If the employee is a manager, have they been doing this with their team?

Camile¹ feels that engineering managers tend to go towards discussing planning items mostly and in her experience, cautions that making time for feedback and coaching is important.

Coaching

Guided questioning is a skill very useful for this area. You would also need to dip in your own experience, show vulnerability to build trust in order for the person to accept most of the coaching. Or you would need to figure out which person can help coach them on a certain item if required.

I appreciate Marcus’s revelation regarding coaching. He suggests that the manager should understand whether an item is urgent and important, and where the employee is on the learning curve. Then you would be able to move to the proper level of the framework: coaching, mentoring, directing and intervening.⁴ The more to the left, the more you gain, but an alarm zone for juniors. The more to the right, the less of a challenge(learning) for the employee, but required when there is higher urgency and importance. If there is room, you can agree with the employee that you both fill in importance & urgency next to each item. This way they would get the most growth possible.

Technical deep dives

What are the pros and cons regarding different solutions of the same technical problem? The more senior engineering management roles you have, the higher level the guided questions would be. What is the architecture of the requirement you are working on? Dr. James has a couple of good examples as well: “Ask about NFRs, that might reveal weak points, or just understand the work and part of infrastructure it belongs to.”³

Process deep dives

I remember reading a book from someone from Netflix that helped handle the scalability challenges, saying that one of the most important things they did was trying to make it easy for organizations to succeed and in most of the time it meant, if possible, removing a process completely. If this is not a possibility, you can try reducing the steps. Do automate as much as possible, too.

Other role insights

In high school, where I grew up, I was (we were all) curious about what different jobs meant, did and how they did it. I felt quite removed from what the end goal was and hence mostly followed what I was told at school. The more knowledge I had about different professions, the better I was able to apply myself to the things that mattered (while still balancing common knowledge and culture — I can appreciate the value of generalists). Like in that long ago case, during my career I often saw managers that didn’t want their employees to know what they did or said they would explain a role but they were vague or didn’t follow up on it. Don’t kill their curiosity. If your goal is to grow that person, and it should be, you should find a way to satisfy that curiosity and explain what you did on a certain task (Dr. James³) or allow for a person to shadow (if enough time and person senior enough) or find someone that can share some insights for some other roles that the employee is interested in. This will make them apply themselves closer to what your goals are. You just bet on their motivation. They will repay the organization kindly.

According to Dr. James, discussing relevant articles and department or company direction are also topics to be discussed, though I would tie these into the previous topics above.

A few more thoughts on topics

Status and Progress updates should not be done during a 1–1. They can be done as part of other ceremonies or through a different medium, or found in tracking tools, or are repeating from another meeting you had, and just take valuable time from the 1–1. The only time you should do a progress update according to Camile is “when you have someone who’s off on a side project that you’re not personally overseeing”.

I would like to end the Topics section with a quote from Dr. James “The connecting themes are sharing, building trust, tech thinking, and interpersonal problems. If you spend time on any of these, you have a valuable one on one.”³

Three key takeouts, a no-no, and a quote :)

1. The agenda grounds the behavior during the 1–1s to gain most of the time spent.
2. Always have an agenda in a shareable document, created mostly by the employee.
3. Topics should be some of: People problems, Planning, Giving Feedback, Coaching, Technical deep dives, Process deep dives, Other role insights

The no-no: !Status and !progress updates!

“The connecting themes are sharing, building trust, tech thinking, and interpersonal problems. If you spend time on any of these, you have a valuable one on one.”³

The summary

1. The agenda grounds the behavior during the 1–1s to gain most of the time spent.
2. allows you to talk about appropriate and important subjects and sufficiently.
3. keeps your natural tendency towards a certain area of 1–1s in check
4. Always have an agenda.
5. maybe do the first one or two as fluid meetings if it feels cold entering agenda items at first. Otherwise 4. :) I can be flexible with the agenda, but it is there to ground us both.
6. Shareable document to increase collaboration, find misalignments and increase transparency.
7. Employee mostly enters items.
8. The manager also supplements the agenda with items that reflect that person from a 1–1 standpoint.
9. habit of adding the items during the week to reduce forgeting some items

Topics

1. People problems
2. Planning
3. Giving Feedback
4. Coaching
5. Technical deep dives
6. Process deep dives
7. Other role insights
8. Status and Progress updates should not be done during a 1–1.
9. Do a progress update only “when you have someone who’s off on a side project that you’re not personally overseeing”.
10. “The connecting themes are sharing, building trust, tech thinking, and interpersonal problems. If you spend time on any of these, you have a valuable one on one.”³

Resources

0. Coaching

General One on ones (for all seniority levels of managers):

1. Cadence (1–1s)
2. Agenda (1–1s)
3. First 1–1s
4. Prior to 1–1s (in the oven ..)
5. During One-on-ones
6. After 1–1s (in the oven ..)
7. Location (1–1s) (in the oven ..)

One-on-Ones for (Engineering) Manager of Managers:

8. Cadence (MoMs’ 1–1s) (in the oven ..)
9. With whom? (MoMs’ 1–1s) (in the oven ..)
10. Agenda (MoMs’ 1–1s) (in the oven ..)
11. During a 1–1 (MoMs’ 1–1s) (in the oven ..)
12. During Interviewing (MoMs’ 1–1s) (in the oven ..)
13. 1–1s with Senior Peers from other functions (MoMs’ 1–1s) (in the oven ..)

The Agenda(1–1s) Linkedin resource for additional audiance to comment, interact and share with.

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Reference

[1] Camille Fournier, “The Manager’s path”, 2017, book
[2] Will Larson, “An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management”, 2019, book
[3] Dr. James Stanier, “Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager: How to Be the Leader Your Development Team Needs”, 2020, book
[4] Marcus F., https://lnkd.in/dghjKmQB, youtube videos
[5] Lara Hogan, https://lnkd.in/dnxKqMdh, blog