How to ensure effective 1:1s
All of us have been there. You want to cancel your 1:1 with your manager because you do not know what to talk about or find it as just a repetition of your daily standups where you report the status of a project. Or, you may be a manager who wants to cancel because you are so busy and you find that your other meetings are more urgent. In essence, either one of you, or worse, both of you, don’t find a lot of value in your 1:1. Should you continue committing your time, then?
What is a 1:1 and why are they important?
1:1s are an opportunity for an individual and their manager to connect. This is, not in the sense of reporting a project status, but more on how both of you can help each other increase the value of your work in a sustainable manner. It helps keep engagement, prevent burnout and increase productivity.
What are some good practices when doing 1:1s?
- Make it a partnership (with ownership skewing towards the “managed” person as they become more senior)
There are many discussions happening about this. Should the manager set an agenda of what things to talk about? Should the individual speak most of the time and the manager be there to listen? Generally, you would want your member to own it. They should be talking 70–80% of the time and your role as a manager would be to ask questions to learn more.
But, remember that this might be harder for people who might not have had a chance to work with a good manager before who listens and would do regular 1:1s or they just might be more junior in their career and still exploring so they might not know what to talk about. In these cases, the manager is expected to set the agenda and speak a little more.
2. Emphasize that this is not the venue for status updates
We want to avoid reporting on what they’re working on. An exception might be if there are recurring pain points for them and you want to dig in as to why it is still happening for the current task. You may also bring up the current task if the point of discussion is not about the project itself but the underlying relationships that you would like to apply in broader context (e.g. constant back-and-forth between product and engineering teams without a clear next step, dependency issues and non-commitment from partner engineering teams)
3. Do it regularly!
I cannot stress enough how important it is not to cancel your 1:1s despite how busy your manager’s calendar might be. Any kind of culture or process improvements you want to introduce are useless if you did not get input from your team. At the same time, walking with them together on their career growth and individual development is critical to increase the impact and delivery efficiency of your team.
4. Give and take feedback
Generally, your feedback should be timely and as close as possible to the behavior you want to keep them doing or improve upon. Your 1:1s are a good way to deliver them if you didn’t have the chance to do that in a more timely manner and to double down if you already did. It can also be a venue to discuss the motivation behind the feedback even further and get the thoughts about it from the individual themselves. This is especially helpful if they have a different communication style in which they cannot react right away to a timely feedback you gave a few days ago and need time to get back to you about it.
Equally important, ask for their feedback about you and if there is anything you can improve (e.g. setting clearer expectations, etc.)
5. Use tools to track notes and have clear action items
Make sure that both of you are accountable to each other. If the member asks for help and you, as a manager, promises a certain kind of support, write it down and set an estimate timeline and concrete next steps on your end.
6. Track their career growth intentionally by regularly discussing their “path to the next level”
Setting clear expectations for them at their current level is one thing, and discussing how they can be exceptional and move to the next is another. If your company has a career matrix and levels, share that with them so they know what gaps they have to fill in and where they’re already doing great at.
7. Build your relationship as a fellow human being
We tend to spend most of our meetings getting down to business right away and forgetting that the person on the other side is also a human being like us. To truly support someone, we would want to know a little bit more than what’s happening on the professional surface level. For example, after striking a small conversation with one of my engineers about our worries in our personal lives and what was keeping us up at night, I discovered that they were super troubled about their US visa. Being an immigrant myself and having the same issue when I was working in Japan before, I realized how bothering it was for him and how it affected concentration at work (not knowing if you could keep your job or not, and, whether you will suddenly need to go back to your home country). By identifying this source of apprehension, I was able to let them know that I can help with getting them working in Canada with company support if needed.
8. Share past experiences, worries and things that helped you grow yourself
People develop faster by learning from other people’s experiences. Why commit a mistake if somebody has already done that for you and you can just figure out what they learned from it? By sharing your experiences, you help your members get an idea of things to try and to avoid. This helps accelerate their growth.
9. Ask questions!
Everyone has an ideal version of how they want things to be! When you ask questions such as “how do we increase delivery of our speed without sacrificing quality” or “what would make your life easier in terms of meeting your deliverable commitments?”, you will be surprised how helpful people want to be. They might propose tools or suggest processes that you might not have thought of yourself.
