Valuable Questions for Workplace One-On-Ones
If you’re not talking to your employees, who are they talking to?
I’ve written previously about the connection between self-awareness and innovation. In short, I argued that more people are valued as authentic individuals, the more likely they are to become creative contributors.
The problem is that not all leaders are self-aware, nor do they know how to develop an authentic relationship with their team to cultivate that much-needed value.
Many people end up in management because they’ve been with the company for a certain number years or because they were proficient at the job they were put in charge of managing. Neither scenario means they are necessarily qualified to be a manger. Being a great programmer does not mean you’ll be a great manager of programmers, for example. They are entirely different skill-sets.
So maybe you are a manager who doesn’t quite know how to develop a team, or perhaps you are a seasoned manager looking for new tools. Whatever the case, Susan Scott in her book Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time provides an excellent list of questions that can be used for productive one-on-one conversations.
