1-on-1s are a crucial time for any Software Engineer looking to improve themselves or grow their career. It’s a time to routinely meet with your manager and have a focused discussion about yourself, where you want to go, and planning the actions to get you there.
In this article, we’ll explore some techniques from the engineer’s perspective, that I’ve found extremely useful to consistently growing and improving in my own roles. Hopefully, you can read through this and be inspired to improve your own 1-on-1s and reap the benefits.
Be accountable
1-on-1s are a joint responsibility, and like other processes, will quickly degrade and fail when all the people involved aren’t accountable. Without accountability, the meeting can quickly turn into a brief check-in without much substance or any action at all.
As an engineer, take the initiative and try to lead the meetings. Ensure that the meetings are taking place consistently, that your thoughts and ideas are heard, your desired career path is understood between both parties, and a plan of action is being created to get you where you want to be.
Here are a few bits of advice to help improve your accountability:
- Ensure that there’s a focused agenda and stick to it. Try by starting off with a discussion on what you want to get out of the meeting. Such as “I feel like I lack skills in x area, can we create a plan to help me improve my skills there?” or “I believe I’m ready to step up in my role, can we discuss and plan on how I might do this in the company?”.
- Write things down! Taking notes is one of the easiest ways to get started on taking action and holding yourself accountable. Be sure not only to write down what talking points you’ve discussed but also include action items to plan the next steps.
- Have a guide and fill it in before the meeting. Something as simple as a quick summary of the sprint (or fortnight), what’s good, what’s bad, what could be done better, and what your focus will be on. The benefit of keeping a log of these meetings is that you can easily look back on the past 1-on-1s and understand how you’re tracking. Which leads us into the next tip.
Be consistent and keep the conversation going.
One of the most important disciplines of growth is to be consistent and 1-on-1s make no exemption to this. To follow up the previous point of ‘Be accountable’, ensure that your 1-on-1s follow a consistent thread and that you regularly revisit notes or ideas that have come from the past meetings to determine your progress.
One easy way to ensure this happens is by recapping your previous 1-on-1 at the beginning of the meeting. You can either start by kicking off the meeting with a recap such as “In our previous 1-on-1, we spoke about me improving my front-end skills. I’d like to continue focusing on that in this meeting if that’s alright”. Or pivot to it shortly in the meeting if you prefer to start with discussing personal updates. It also helps if you use something similar to the 1-on-1 template in a previous example to drive the conversation, so both you and your manager can be on the same page.
No work updates
1-on-1s are important, but they can be relatively short, and while many of them start well, they can quickly devolve into casual work updates that can be done at a more suitable time. How many times have you been in a 1-on-1 and began talking about what’s interesting, or even challenging you at the time? But very quickly begin to fall down the slope of relating these ideas to your work, and then simply updating your manager on what’s been happening on the day-to-day?
First of all, this is perfectly fine! Much of what we do today, or what we want to do tomorrow, sprouts from what we’ve worked on and not everybody goes home after work and starts immediately writing more code or exploring side-projects. Ensure you hold yourself and your manager accountable to not letting the conversation stray from yourself and your areas of growth.
Here are some common pitfalls to avoid:
- Avoid talking about irrelevant company updates.
You could be halfway through your 1-on-1, and perhaps a topic comes up, such as the company picking up a new project and how your team will be affected. This can be okay at times, but remember to evaluate the talking point constantly. Could this update be discussed in another meeting? Generally, if the topic affects your team as a whole, then you can chat about it later and focus on yourself for now.
- Avoid the idea of linking work items to learning new skills
For example, you might start the meeting off by talking about wanting to improve your skills in the front-end. The manager replies “That’s good, we have a ticket in our Jira to do some front-end work if you want?”, this is perhaps a bit too close to work talk. You can talk about what exact tickets to work on during our stand-up or refinement meetings. Instead, it would be best to focus the conversation on planning how you’ll improve your skills consistently. After you’ve done so, you might then talk about how to plan and schedule your work items to accommodate this.
Ask questions, listen and be mentored
One of these meetings' best parts is to get some quiet, uninterrupted time with someone who is almost certainly a lot more experienced than yourself. Previous points I’ve made encourage taking the initiative and asking questions to help push you in the right direction of career growth. But ensure that you spend some time listening.
When discussing your career goals, ask your lead what their experience was in your situation, or even what recommendations they’d have for you depending on what level you are at.
When discussing a problem you’re trying to solve, or perhaps even a problem you’ve already solved. Ask the lead what they thought of your solution, as well as what they would have done given your situation. It’s insane what a difference in approach or perspective can have on any given solution.
If there’s no topic at hand? Ask the lead what areas outside of your jobs interest them, as well as any side-projects they may have. As well as any advice on areas you’re interested in learning or understanding.
A few quick tidbits that might help
This article is running longer than I thought it would! So I’ll summarise a few easy concepts to help further improve your 1-on-1s.
- Ditch the meeting room and go for a walk and/or grab a coffee. Sometimes it’s hard to break the work talk mindset, so get some fresh air and exercise!
- Put the laptops away, stick to writing notes. This can help both you and your manager achieve better active listening. I personally find that the quality of 1-on-1s plummets when one or both people are distracted on their laptops.
- Don’t lose momentum. This coincides with consistency. If you can help it, be as consistent as possible and ensure that you don’t lose momentum on your personal development. It’s very easy to slip up and miss a meeting or two and it’s very hard to get the momentum back when stopped focusing on what you’re trying to get out of your 1-on-1s.
