How to ruin a 1:1

Illustration by Gaëlle Malenfant

Yeah, you did read right: I am going to talk about how to ruin a 1:1. My intentions are pure though, since it’s actually about showing some of the pitfalls you should try to avoid, if you want to build a trusting relationship with your employee as a manager — the basis for a positive feedback culture.

The Management Team at Doctolib takes 1:1s very seriously, and of course we have our own guidelines and tools on how to do it. Still, it’s very easy to ruin your 1:1s. We all either witnessed it or did it ourselves. I definitely did. Both.

While there’s many good articles on how to do a 1:1, I just recently thought “There’s so many things you can do wrong”, and working in health tech even suggests to follow the “primum non nocere — first, do no harm” precept, and first to avoid (unintentional) harm.

To make the whole exercise more fun, I decided to use a technique I learned about a couple of months ago: reverse brainstorming. The idea is, to define a main objective, and then actively sabotage it as good as you can — in other words: what’s the opposite of what you actually should do? What I really liked about this approach, is how it reveals what you are already doing wrong or where you can improve.

To actually start it, we need to first agree on a main objective for a 1:1. Since that is a whole topic in itself, I won’t go into details and assume that building trust should be one of the main objectives, knowing that I’m not alone in this belief.

The 1:1

Imagine now, you want to create a safe environment and trust-based relationship with your DR (direct report) in the following scenario.

Set up the meeting in an open space or close to other team mates

• There’s no better way to ensure that you’re not going to talk about important things than to talk in a public or non-private space.

Always be late to show up or postpone or even cancel last minute

• Nothing says more elegantly: Yeah we do this, but I have more important things to deal with than your growth. Who would you rather trust with your professional development?

Give a lame excuse for why you are late and why this meeting is not as important

• That makes your DR really feel special. Doesn’t it?
• Bonus: confuse the name!

Start the conversation with an ambiguous quote on a recent incident like: “That didn’t go too well with that bug fix the other day, did it?”

• A missing level of detail adds a little salt to the exploitation of your managees failure.

Since that failure was actually your very own mistake, make sure your underling understands they’re now on their own with it

• If your staff member is now on an uncomfortable emotional level (and that’s not unlikely at this point), it’s time to make a joke about their feelings and ask how they plan to improve without offering help.
• Bonus: criticise their ability to receive feedback!

In case your employee is not in a total shutdown already (also not unlikely), they might suggest some action to improve. While (not) listening, you can play with your phone, and comment the suggestion with a chuckle

• Not listening is probably the easiest to accomplish while at the same time guaranteeing longterm trust issues.

Fill the rest of the time with a managementese lecture about how the world or the company works, and your own problems.

• What could be more interesting than your own thoughts and perspectives?

Top it off by leaving earlier to make a private call

After the 1:1

• Walk the halls and talk with everyone about what you just discussed privately.
• If possible, look suspiciously in your employees direction when they’re passing by.

Longterm options

• Promise to do things, and simply drop them.
• Of course, you shouldn’t keep track of what you were discussing and agreed on.
• Randomly reward or criticise good or bad performance, regardless of what was discussed or set as goals.

Conclusion

Of course this is an exaggeration and not based on real events. All similarities to real events are accidental and have never been experienced or delivered by me. I hope. The whole point is about recognising room for improvement in our own behaviour. There is lots of reading material available on people management, but as a result of our little exercise, I would summarise it like this:

• Establishing trust should be one of your first and main goals as a people manager.
• Building trust can start with or be supported by little things like e.g. punctuality and pleasantries, but in order to get to a higher level, it requires time, patience and effort.
• Trust is easier destroyed than built: walk (inadvertently) into just one of the worse aforementioned traps, and trust — and with it your relationship — might start to crumble.
• Live and demonstrate values that support trust: e.g. reliability, consistency, authenticity, confidentiality, integrity, mindfulness and humaneness come to mind, but I almost certainly forgot many others.

Let me know what you think, and even more importantly: do you have outrageous, real or synthesised examples of how to ruin a 1:1?

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