I have a set of questions I ask in some variation at the end of my 1:1s.
What are you taking away? What was most useful to you?
These two I got from my coach and I use them both at work and in my own coaching. The concrete questions are useful, but it can also be a source of implicit feedback about what was useful / what was less useful.
Is there anything I can help you with or do for you?
It’s amazing to me how often this starts another conversation about what someone needs help with. I also like that it frames asking for help as a normal thing.
Is there anything I can be doing better? Is there anything I do that you particularly appreciate?
I ask these more periodically because I want it to be unexpected enough that people actually think about it and try to give me an answer. The second question is useful for getting at least some specifics if the first one doesn’t elicit any information.
Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that I should have? If I made you complain about one thing, what would it be?
Useful for flipping someone’s thinking around if I feel like there may be things I’m missing.
Broadly speaking, my overarching agenda for any 1:1 is as follows:
It starts with the checkin, “how’s it going?”, an open ended question that some people respond with a status update, and some do not. The important thing is what comes next – finding out how the person feels. Sometimes a status update is useful context for that, sometimes it’s just how we get there. Either is fine.
Then we move into the most interesting part of the 1:1: what could be better.
Information / context is where I spend a lot of time for new hires, or someone taking on new responsibility. E.g. if I have a new lead, they might have questions about how things work or what they share about how they think things are going will surface things they may be missing or need to pay more attention to.
Practical help is less common, but sometimes necessary – if someone is overwhelmed, or needs to escalate something, then that’s something we would spend time on. Equally, I might help them with finding help elsewhere.
Development is the most interesting part of the 1:1. This is about helping them be more effective (or sometimes just happier at work). For many people, it’s not necessary to be in this space every week, but making some time for this more often than not is key to supporting people’s development.
Below is my model for developmental conversations.
Thanks for the Feedback breaks feedback into evaluative feedback (where someone stands) and developmental feedback (how someone can improve). Coaching is separate – where the individual decides what they want to do, and can – in context – build on both of these, or exist outside of it in a pure coaching relationship.
Evaluative feedback is critical – if someone doesn’t know where they stand, that can undermine everything else – but is the least empowered place. The failure mode is the evaluation loop, where you keep discussing the evaluation but it doesn’t change, because there was no meaningful action. In this space, there’s a lot of emotional work on both sides, but no movement.
Moving into “how can I improve” moves into action, and is more empowering. The person can change the outcomes or evaluation through changing their actions. It’s less empowering than coaching, because it’s more about implementing suggestions. The feedback loop is more productive than the evaluation loop, but progress is linear. The disempowerment trap is to return to evaluation through the question of “is this enough?“
Coaching is the most empowered space, because it is where the person asks what do I want, the empowered choice loop is where transformation – or exponential growth – happens. The disempowerment trap here is to give away the choice, and ask for direction instead.
I want to be clear that no space in this model is bad, typically we need to visit all of them. However the difference is between people who are highly coachable and those that are not is the time spent in each place.
Someone highly coachable:
Gets some evaluative feedback.
Takes suggestions well.
Figures out how they want to build on it and what they want to do.
This follows the top path, and as a result very little time is spent in evaluation, some time in developmental, but the bulk of the time is in the coaching space, and that extends well beyond the time spent together.
Someone who is not coachable:
Doesn’t have ideas on how they can improve.
Asks what to do instead.
Falls into an evaluation loop.
This follows the bottom path, and cycles down and around, i.e. even after moving into developmental, returns to evaluative. The bulk of the time is spent in evaluation, with a small amount of time in developmental, and none in coaching.
Whilst the evaluation space is not a hugely productive one, it’s unwise to skip it entirely. Someone who is hard on themselves might seem very receptive to feedback and full of ideas about how they can improve, but if they come to this from the idea that they are falling short and need to do better, it’s less empowering than if they are confident they are doing well and valued, and deciding what they can do to truly thrive.
My coach (Dani) went through this list of questions in our call last week, and I’ve been using it in my last 1:1s of 2017. I’ve been finding it interesting as a structure for a conversation that looks back at the year and where we are now, versus where we were a year ago. Sometimes it’s not the answer itself, but the conversation it kicks off…
1.) Who did you meet this year who is now in your life? What about meeting them was significant?
2.) What experience/situation caused you to grow?
3.) What experience did you lean into despite fear?
4.) What accomplishments are you most proud of?
5.) In what area of your life did you make some progress?
6.) What was missing from your life this year?
7.) Who have you helped succeed? / Who has helped you succeed?
8.) What are you most grateful for, and why?
9.) What were the most fun times you had?
10.) What advice would you give yourself for 2018?
One of the first things I did as a new manager of managers was schedule skip 1:1s with everyone on the team. I blocked off an hour per person, and crammed ~20 hours of them into my first two weeks – along with a lightning trip from Buenos Aires to Philly for WordCamp US.
It was exhausting, but it was also illuminating. Change can be hard, and change in leadership can be especially scary – making that time for people, getting to know them and taking any questions they had of me – taught me a lot about what was going on in the team, and helped me be more successful.
Some of those first 1:1s were pretty dramatic. Lately they’ve not been as exciting, but that’s good. The goal isn’t just the meeting itself, the goal is to have a connection to people on the team, a more nuanced sense of what’s going on.
My standard set of questions are:
How are you? Good to include life-specifics if there are any, e.g. “How was your vacation?”
How are things on $team?
How’s it going with $project? Mention recent achievements here if applicable, “I’m excited that X shipped!”
Do you have any questions for me? If someone doesn’t have anything, I typically respond that it’s fine if they don’t have questions for our 1:1, if that means they ask me questions as they have them.
Do you have any feedback for me? If there’s nothing, one thing I’ve been trying lately: “Do you have any advice for me?”
It turns out, you can totally fill an hour with these questions if they turn into a conversation (which hopefully they do) and they cover what I care about:
How are they personally?
How do they feel about their team?
How do they feel about their work?
Is there anything they’re wondering about?
If there anything they want to change?
For managers it can feel weird that someone else is having a 1:1 with your directs. A tip I learned from my friend Julia Grace is to always sync with the manager ahead of time. Now we’ve done it a few times, it’s not a big deal for most people and I just give a general heads up, unless there’s something the manager and I are worried about, in which case we’ll sync up ahead of time and make sure we’re on the same page.
For scheduling, group teams together which is quite exhausting, but also makes it easier to see trends. Afterwards I’ll follow up with leads with any feedback or broader questions (e.g. if there seems to be a pattern). At first I found them a really important mechanism for getting managers feedback. Over time, we’ve developed different methods (e.g. feedback surveys, org surveys) and as the teams are running better that’s become less important. I generally think it’s a bad sign if I come away from a skip 1:1 with direct TODOs for that person, but sometimes people raise things that we discuss in the weekly leads call, or that I try and clarify for the entire team in an internal blog post.
I try to offer people a choice of format, unless say I just had tonsillitis and look like a reanimated corpse and then I might rule video out. At Automattic, we do a lot of 1:1s via text, which I actually really like. It might seem strange, but when people are used to it, you can have really good 1:1s via text, and I find it much less stressful than blocked off hours of back to back video or voice calls. I use Google calendar appointment slots to schedule, and if I know I’m going to be coworking or similar I mark them text only.
Skip 1:1s can feel really time consuming. I do them every other month, and I know on the months I have them it’s pretty stressful to block off all that time on my calendar. It’s easy to feel like you don’t have time to do them, but I’ve concluded that I don’t have time not to have a connection to everyone on my team, I don’t have time to only find things out when it’s a crisis, and I don’t have time not to hear people’s questions as close as possible to when they have them.
If you liked this, you might like my post On 1:1s.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that 1:1s are one of the most important activities of being a manager. And yet we all know of managers who don’t do them, or do them so badly that they can hardly be called 1:1s at all. I’ve heard about managers who show up to the 1:1 and talk at their report until the time is over. I’m not sure if this is better or worse than no 1:1 at all. The worst manager I ever had, I dreaded our 1:1s so much that I used to get up an hour later on days when I would have to speak to him. My recollection of them was that there would be a terrible, awkward silence, which I would feel compelled to fill, but anything I said would be judged and used against me.
Contrived social situations can be awkward. In a new report-manager relationship, both sides have to show up to a meeting with someone they barely (or don’t at all) know, and talk. Some people might face that situation with equanimity. As a new manager, I did not. It was terrifying, but worthwhile – and before too long had passed it was clear that everything I’d read about 1:1s being the most important use of my time as a manager was true.
At the core of a good 1:1 is this: show up and listen.
Let’s break this down.
Show Up
1:1s should be predictable. They should happen at regular intervals, and should only be cancelled under extreme circumstances – and then rescheduled as close to the planned date as possible. You should be on time. This is true for every meeting, of course, but being late for 1:1s can send a message that this kind of meeting is not a priority. That it’s something you fit in when you can, rather than a core part of your job.
Listen
Here is my management trick that works in almost every situation: ask questions, and listen to the answers.
Bonus points for good questions, but questions at all is a start. There are even lists of questions out there to help you! I loved Lara Hogan’s Questions for Our First 1:1, and I found some really helpful questions in First Break All the Rules.
The first question I like to ask anyone, though, is just “how are you?” And then I care about the answer. You don’t always get the most useful answer to this at first. In general “how are you?” is something people get asked a lot and the only answer the asker wants to hear is “fine”. But when I consistently show up and care about the answer I find I start getting interesting ones. Maybe someone is feeling under the weather. Maybe they are excited about something. Maybe they’ve been having a bad day. Maybe they just got some good news. Maybe they just got some bad news. You have no idea until you ask – and listen.
Starting with this question for a while made me anxious, because some people would respond by telling me about their work. I had internalised that 1:1s are not for status updates, but eventually I realised that how people are feeling about their work is not a status update, and it’s a perfectly natural way to start a conversation at work. I also realised that if someone is in the middle of some problem when you start talking to them, then it’s probably top of mind. Instead of asking them not to talk about it, giving them some time to talk themselves into a different headspace is a perfectly reasonable way to spend some of the time you have together. You should have better sources of information for “what is this person working on” than a 1:1, and more immediate signals for “things possibly not going to plan”, but a 1:1 can be a time to talk about “how does this person feel about what they are working on” – which if things aren’t going to plan can be good information about why things aren’t going to plan.
Having time for some undirected conversation is part of why I like 1 hour 1:1s. I read about them in High Output Management and the idea of spending an hour with someone made me feel uncomfortable enough that I sat with it and decided it was an idea worth trying. It’s not about spending the entire hour talking, but about making that time commitment that the whole hour is there if you want it. It gives you time to make feedback something you will work on together (so you don’t just drop it and rush to your next meeting), and it also gives time to work on something together, if that’s something someone wants to do. For example, working on an abstract for a talk they are thinking about.
At my last job, I did 1-hour biweekly 1:1s (every Friday, alternating between the iOS team one week, and the Android team the other) and whenever I mentioned this online I would get men telling me that biweekly wasn’t enough and giving me unsolicited advice about how often I should be doing 1:1s. This really annoyed me for many reasons, but eventually I realised that a core misconception that they had was that the biweekly 1:1 was our main communication. This was completely untrue. Once I found my rhythm, I spoke to everyone who reported to me every day, and if there was something that it seemed like we should talk about then we would jump on a call. Multiple times this resulted in one guy on my team telling me something and saying it wasn’t big, it was just because I asked right then. And maybe it wasn’t that important. But I would sooner know, and I would sooner he felt like he could tell me.
For me, 1:1s were about active relationship building, with a focus on the important-but-not urgent. But having built a relationships where we talked regularly and I listened, that created space for conversations to happen outside of the 1:1. And I never worried about missing something that was both important-and-urgent because 1:1s only happened every other week.
If 1:1s are the only time you speak to someone who reports to you, how to run that 1:1 effectively is not your biggest problem. The 1:1 is the time you set to demonstrate that you are someone who listens, and that generally things are better for you knowing about them.
TL;DR
If you think you don’t have time to do 1:1s, you don’t have time not to do 1:1s. Just show up and listen. It’s a solid start.
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