Thou shalt not talk about operational topics in 1to1 meetings
How I regularly commit the 7 deadly sins of 1to1 Meetings
I've often heard both new and experienced managers expressing concerns about how to run 1to1s with their direct reports and other collaborators.
They sometimes feel trapped in a narrow interpretation of the idea that “1to1s are a space for employees”. As such they feel they need to walk on egg shells not to be perceived as if they were secretly talking about - God forbid - operational topics in a 1to1!
I think we're doing ourselves more harm than good by taking such a narrow and dogmatic view on what is in scope for 1to1s. The result is that both employees and managers are not getting the best out of them.
I have experienced different degrees and combinations of dogmatic views such as the following ones:
1to1s are absolutely not for discussing operational topics!
The agenda should be owned 100% by the employee, not the manager!
You should only focus on career development!
Every time you reschedule a 1to1 a puppy dies!
I think it's time to help practitioners do the right thing and relieve them from the sense of guilty they might have accumulated after years of shameful violation of these commandments.
What follows might come across as controversial, and of course it only reflects my own personal opinions based on quite a few hours spent in such meetings. If you're just comfortable following the common - and allow me to say - simplistic view on Dos and Don’ts for these meetings, you should probably stop reading now.
But before we move on: I don't know if the right way to call them is 1to1s, 1-on-1s, 1:1, 1+1, 1*1 or what have you. I just call them 1to1s, and I'm not planning to spend time discussing naming conventions. Not in this post at least.
My interpretation of what 1to1s are really for
My recipe for 1to1s that really help your direct reports get better at their job include a combination of the following ingredients.
Topics brought by the employee. OK, I'm starting with the easy one here, but just hold on for a second.
To the risk of stating the obvious, the reason I think these topics matter is the following:
First and foremost: we create a space to discuss what is bothering our employees, what they're struggling with and what ultimately they think they need help with. We do this without judgement and we welcome any topic that they put on the agenda.
We create the culture and habit of ownership. The person will practice the skills of preparing meetings, guiding a discussion and thinking about any of those topics in depth.
It allows you as a manager to get a better understanding of the level of self-awareness of your employee. You'll learn what is important to them and how they tend to prioritise their focus and energy. You'll get a lot of data points to better understand the skills they needs your help develop.
Operational discussions. There, I said it!
Before you get all worked up, allow me to be more specific. I don't expect you to go into many details about progress, deliveries, tasks, etc. What I'm usually trying to do here is to get a sense of how the person is able to cope with their current workload. Are they overwhelmed? Are they blocked on something? Are they missing out an opportunity to get some external help?
These conversations are great opportunities for you, the manager, to mentor the employee. They can learn how to deal with a specific problem, or situation. You, as a manager, will gather a lot of insights and data points on the areas, competences and skills they needs help on, including their blind spots.
The general outcome of bringing operational topics to 1to1s is that you'll help the other person take better decisions, look at problems from different perspectives and strengthen the relationship between the two of you. Operational issues are often what keep people busy most of the time, as such they should not dismissed and considered less relevant to the topic of personal development.
Observations and feedback from both parties.
Some people argue that 1to1s are not a place for the manager to give feedback, only to receive it. I think this view is both paternalistic and counterproductive.
Continuous feedback is extremely powerful, and 1to1s are a perfect place for it. As a manager you can benefit a lot from bringing up observations, questions and feedback based on how you've seen the employee perform or act during the previous days. It could be very specific feedback on how they ran a presentation or a meeting, observations on some inconsistent behaviours or actions, or even simple questions along the lines of “I've observed you doing X and Y this last week, and I'm not sure how to interpret it. Can you help me understand your reasoning?”.
Make sure you proactively ask for feedback too as part of these meetings. Like with any other habit, by consistently practicing this over time the other person will start coming up with feedback proactively without the need to be prompted for it. Once you see that happening, it means you're doing a good job creating trust with your team members.
Discussions on ways of working.
How does the employee prefer to work? How do you as a manager like to work with your employees? 1to1s are great places to be very explicit about agreements and “rules of engagement” between the two. Some people prefer to be given more autonomy. Other prefer to be given a lot of context. Some will prefer very specific instructions without too much context.
I don't expect you to revisit these rules of engagement on a weekly basis, as that would be very unproductive.
If I had to summarise in a sentence how I think about 1to1s from a manager's perspective, that would be: help me help you
The employee has the responsibility to co-create the conditions for the manager to better support their growth. Focus on the desired outcome, and don't get too hung up on what is allowed and what isn't.
How I structure my 1to1s
If this all sounds nice and clean, you might as well wonder how to make that happen in practice.
Let's get into some of those details.
Even though these meetings benefit from a natural conversation and flow, I like to structure them around a few pillars and questions that I want to make sure will be covered.
This is the structure I use as compass to guide the conversation:
I start with a general review of the past period.
That usually means the prior week, or two weeks at most. I typically ask “How was your week?”, and make sure we touch on both personal and professional highlights of the week. The reason I like to start off with this question is that in most of the cases, when everything is going fine, we don't spend more than 5 minutes on it, and it help setting the stage for the following conversation. In cases when things aren't all right though we often end up spending the whole meeting on whatever comes up here.
I pay close attention to any sign of dissonance or lack of satisfaction that the employee might be sharing. I always follow-up with inquisitive questions whenever I hear statements such as “It's been a really busy week” or even “it's been an OK week”.
With more junior employees that might have a hard time articulating their needs and problems, this question can easily serve as a catalyst for a deeper exchange.
Prioritise topics (if needed)
When there are a lot of topics on the agenda coming from both of us, I typically invest about a minute or two aligning on the general priorities. I deliberately suggest to start with topics proposed by them and keep mines for later. Sometimes I might have an urgent one that I need to discuss with the person. In such rare cases I'll be very explicit and suggest we take these early in the conversation.
By following this approach I want to make sure we focus on what matters, accepting that not everything has the same level of priority.
Furthermore, by prioritising the topics proposed by the employee I practice positive reinforcement. By signalling that their issues and concerns are important I'm creating an incentive for them to come up with their issues more often and more regularly. This helps creating a context of psychological safety.
Last but not least, I want both of us to consistently practice the habit of prioritisation, which eventually will become second nature.
Take Notes and capture actions
As we go through each and every topic in the agenda we call out specific actions and I make sure to take a note in the 1to1 document. I will capture the task, who will own it, and a desired deadline. In some cases I immediately add in an agenda topic for the next session to follow-up on a specific action or discussion to make sure we don't forget to follow-up.
There are also some topics that are covered in 1to1s less regularly, due to their own nature. These can be related to the overall cadence of your company, or the simple fact that we can't reinvent the world every single week. You need time to build it between sessions.
The most common of such big themes for me are:
Reviewing the employee's personal OKRs.
Personal OKRs are a very powerful tool for individuals that have managerial duties or have a senior IC role. Given their roles, I expect contributions from these members of the team to span beyond the scope of work of the team they belong to or manage.
Personal OKRs tend to come on top of OKRs they share with the rest of their team. This means that they both need to be compatible with the team's engagement, and they need to be realistic in terms of workload as to not end up distracting the person from their main focus.
Given their nature, I don't find it useful to look at them every week, and prefer to look at them roughly on a monthly basis.
Ask some big hairy questions.
Now, you don't want to abuse this one as you might give the impression that you're becoming disconnected from the reality of day to day work. At the same time, you want to allow yourself and your team members to go off on crazy thoughts and stay with them for a while.
Such questions can touch different areas. They could be around how we're structuring the organisation, a certain technical approach or paradigm we're following, or even the evolution of their own role within the team.
Regularly questioning how we're doing things teaches us not to take the status quo as an immutable constraint. With enough conviction and motivation anything can happen, and the first step is to simply talk about an idea, and see where it takes you.
As it is to be expected, in most of the cases these discussion will lead us to realise this was not such a good idea after all. Very often though I've seen these seeds blooming into substantial and impactful changes.
When it comes to the logistics of 1to1 meetings, I follow a very simple set of rules:
I prefer short, higher frequency meetings to longer and lower frequency meetings. This means my favourite format is 30 minutes every week with every single person in my team.
Even though it's not always possible, I try not to schedule another meeting immediately after a 1to1. This allows for some buffer in case we feel the need to keep discussing a topic a bit longer. This buffer can also be useful for organising notes, tackling some action or simply take a break and recharge before the next one.
I like to have 1to1s on Friday as that invites to look back at the week that just passed while the memory of it is still quite fresh. I personally struggle with “coming back with cold cache” on Mondays. Fridays are also good as they create an opportunity to take concerns off of people's minds instead of keeping them lingering during the whole weekend.
The capital sin of rescheduling 1to1s
Should you reschedule 1to1s or treat them as sacred artefacts from an ancient civilisation?
Like it's often the case, my answer to that questions is: “it depends”.
It is very important to take 1to1 meeting seriously, like any other meeting for that matter.
This translates into making it a rule to hold them regularly, be present, maximise their impact, and all the other good things we've already mentioned.
At the same time, rescheduling a meeting with only 2 participants has significantly less overhead than moving a meeting with 4-5+ attendants. As such, I think it's perfectly fine and quite healthy to occasionally have to reschedule a 1to1 to make room for a meeting with more people.
Just make sure this doesn't become a habit, as it might be a sign of you having a very poor control over your own time. Do inform the person that is being impacted by the change. Try to reschedule the 1to1 on the same day, and definitely make sure you check with your employee that they're OK with that before making the change. You don't want to reschedule a 1to1 they have been waiting for the entire week to discuss a pressing matter.
This is one more reason why I prefer to have weekly 30 minutes meetings. It's generally easy to find a free 30 minutes slot in the same day. In case we need to skip one, the next one is just one week away and doesn't require shifting the entire schedule. Weekly cadence provides better flexibility and resilience.
Conclusions and “challenge”
The way I do 1to1s today is the result of many years of practice and iterations. Perfection doesn't exist, and I do hope you'll find some of these learnings useful. Let me know if end up adopting some of my recommendations.
As I'm constantly learning, I would love to hear from you all in the comments section. I'd like every post to turn into a conversation with all the readers of “Sudo Make Me a CTO”.
I'm currently working on the “ultimate” Notion template for organising and tracking 1to1s with my team members. I will give away for free the template to the first 1000 subscribers of “Sudo Make Me a CTO” once we pass the 1000 subscribers threshold.
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Thanks for reading, I'll see you in the comment section!