Pragmatic advice on 1on1s

You read that 1on1s are a very important meeting for managers, so you schedule them from time to time. Unfortunately there are sometimes big gaps between meetings as you are travelling or busy and you forget to schedule those meetings. When having them you do have a nice talk with your report, where she gives you a long status update, but after a while it feels like no side is getting anything out of these meetings. Then your report quits and mentions that she could not see any development for her role and therefore looked for a new job.

So maybe not all of that might sound familiar to you but I bet every manager has at least experienced some of these things. 1on1s are actually not that hard if you follow some of the easy rules outlined below:

• Make it a repeating calendar entry

Why should anybody schedule each meeting separately, when it should happen every two weeks? And still I see a lot of managers who do that. Choose a day/time and frequency (more to a suggested frequency below) and make it a repeating meeting in the calendar — so you only have to change it if someone travels or is sick.

• Day to day vs. long term

So in the example above the employee quits because she doesn’t see any development for her. Why is that? Most likely the manager and her never talked about it. This is a big risk in 1on1s that they tend to be very focused on day to day issues and seldomly about longer term topics like career development. This can be very easily avoided by setting up two different meetings. In my experience setting up a meeting with the title ‘AG/NF 1on1 day to day’ every two weeks and another one ‘AG/NF 1on1 long term’ works best. You can obviously change the scheduling as you want, but separating day to day and long term helps a lot. (AG and NF are initials of the manager and report).

This schedule means that you have three 1on1s a month with your report, I’d consider this the minimum.

• Have a document for it

Do you know this: ‘wow, I need to talk to my report X about this topic’ — and then you forget it until the next 1on1 happens?

The solution is easy: Create a document where you (and your report) collect all topics which should be discussed in the next 1on1. Here I personally prefer Google Docs, but other documents are also fine. As a nice side-effect this document is really great if someone switches managers and the new managers can see the whole history of 1on1 topics.

EXAMPLE:

24/6/2014

Needed Reqs for Q3

RfQ for next CDN contract

10/06/2014

Review Q2 targets (done)

Sync about conference attendence (agreed on Velocity in NY)

• Standard questions

Now you have regularly scheduled meetings with a document and a good separation between long term and day to day topics, but what are you now actually talking about? There are a lot of standard questions to be found on the web, here are some I constantly use:

- How are you? (sounds funny, but it is always a good start)

- How can I help you the best?

- What are your biggest impediments to do a better job?

- Are there any performance issues in your team?

- Do you feel confident hitting the team goals?

- How is hiring going?

- Who in the company is doing an exceptionally good job? (I always prefer this way of asking because the positive spin makes people answer more honestly)

- Where do you want to be in this organisation in 6 months/2 years?

I hope that helps for starters. There is obviously way more to it then the few things I mentioned above, but by following those points you can avoid the most common pitfalls.