The Top 5 Things Managers are Trying to get out of 1:1s

When I first started working, I can remember having 1:1s with my manager every other week and 1:1s with my skip level maybe once a month and these were the most awkward things imaginable. I didn’t know what to talk about; I didn’t really understand the purpose of them. I can remember my manager asking if I had any questions and sort of wondering if that meant there was something I was supposed to be asking. With my skip level, I can remember always having this feeling that he was expecting something from me in those meetings, but I had no idea what it was. I actually found it very stressful to meet with him because I was constantly trying to understand what he was looking for from me. Since that first job, I’ve transitioned to management and ultimately back to a purely technical role, which has given me a much better perspective on what managers are looking for from 1:1s.

When I transitioned to management, one of the first things that they taught us was that 1:1s should not be status updates. If you found yourself doing that, then you should find a different avenue to be getting status to free up 1:1s for other things. They were less clear about what 1:1s should be. Based on conversations with other managers, experiences with my own managers and my own experiences, I informally built up a list of how I used my 1:1s with the engineers I worked with.

1. Get a Pulse on the Individual Engineers

My number one priority in the 1:1 was to get a pulse on how the engineer I was meeting with was doing. Is she happy with what she’s working on? Is he blocked by anything? Is there anything bothering her? Is he happier than last week or less happy? Is there anything I can or should be helping with? Ultimately, one of my biggest goals as a manager was to make sure that my strong engineers are happy so that they stay and grow. The earlier I could detect problems or detect that they might not be completely happy with what they’re working on, the earlier I could try to change things or correct situations.

2. Understand Team Health

As a manager at Box, you are not only expected to grow the people reporting to you, but you’re also expected to lead the projects that your team is working on and make sure that the team as a whole is executing efficiently. To that end, the next biggest thing I was trying to understand was team health. Often as a manager, you don’t have the time to be down in the code with everyone, so it’s hard to get a completely accurate sense of how hard any particular person is working. Likewise, if someone’s not pulling their weight, unless I go out of my way to specifically check up on them, it can be hard to notice. If there were interpersonal problems or if someone blew up in a meeting, I might not directly know about it. Or maybe it’s not a problem with a particular person, but a problem with team function. Maybe no one’s willing to make decisions or no one really trusts each other or the team is really struggling with some company process. With all of these, I relied on team members to tell me where I should be looking or where there might be problems. I can’t make the team stronger unless I know that there’s an issue and often the people on the team are in the best position to alert me of any issues.

3. Give and Receive Feedback

1:1s are my best opportunity for feedback. I mean this going in both directions — I often used 1:1s to both give and receive feedback. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like my manager is giving me much feedback, but after realizing how difficult it is to make it clear when I was giving feedback, I find it a little easier to spot. Feedback often isn’t book-ended with ‘I have some feedback for you’ and may come off as minor comments here and there — which, if you’re doing well, is likely all you’ll need anyway. In addition to giving feedback, as a manager I was often also looking for feedback. I might not ask directly if the person had feedback for me, but I would ask how they felt about a decision or how they felt about the process the team is currently implementing or a number of other things. Through all of this, I was trying to understand how my decisions were being perceived and if I was doing the best job that I could be.

4. Cascade Information

I often used 1:1s as an opportunity to cascade information. Making an announcement in a group setting means that everyone finds out at the same time and you can prevent rumors, but at the same time, many times people don’t feel safe asking questions or expressing concerns in a group setting. Particularly with sensitive information, a 1:1 meeting can give people the opportunity to ask questions or react to news fully and honestly. With both sensitive and non-sensitive information, people often have very different questions or care about very different parts of a piece of information. For example, when announcing a management change, one person was worried about how it might affect their next shot at promotion while another was worried about knowledge loss to the team while another was mostly just interested in what the change meant for me personally. All of these are totally valid responses but all very different and needed to be handled in different ways.

5. Build Trust

Finally, 1:1s were a chance to build trust and get to know the people I was working with and for them to get to know me. In my experience, trust is often far more important than we give it credit for. The first time I met with our then head of engineering, I was totally freaked out. I knew it was a good career move to get to know him better and would likely be helpful for me to understand his perspectives on a variety of topics. Despite this, in our first meeting, I had no idea what to talk to him about. That trust wasn’t there yet. He started the 1:1 by chatting about running — something we both did. We kept up that topic for a good 10–15 minutes, which may seem like a waste of time, but it gave me the time to calm down, remember that he’s just a person too and to become comfortable enough with the situation to bring up real topics. Quite honestly, if we hadn’t spent that much time talking about something completely un-work related or if he had made me feel like I was wasting his time, I’m not sure if I would have ever worked up the courage to have another conversation with him. Often these casual conversations are primarily to build the foundation for people to be comfortable enough with me to bring up any topic they want; if not in that particular meeting, then in some future one. Additionally, they help me to perceive various aspects of a person’s character and to better understand their perspective and motivations.

Initially I struggled to figure out what managers were looking to get out of 1:1s. After experience with several managers, and ultimately going into management myself, I’ve realized that there are actually a lot of things managers want to get out of their 1:1s. As a manager, I was trying to get a pulse on both the individual and the team, give and receive feedback, cascade information and build enough trust to make all of those other things easier in the future.