My reflection on one-on-one meetings

The first advice I got to be a good manager is to make your one-on-one meetings count.

They are the best tool of a manager.

But how to make the meeting useful to me and my direct reports is always something on my mind.

The other day, I read Start Making Your One-on-One Meetings More Meaningful by Jason Waller. I like the proposed TAM model to help me organize my one-on-one meetings into more structured agendas, and this inspired me to reflect my thoughts on one-on-ones too.

Like how I learn other things, my learning on one-on-one is working in progress. I start with reading on-line materials and books to gain knowledge, then I practice during my 1:1s, then I reflect, adapt with some new ideas to experiment to make my meetings more effective.

What are the one-on-one meetings for and why we have them? I think it relates to Engineering Manager(EM)’s role perception. Below are my own role definition for the EM role.

Image by Bonnie Pan

In my viewpoint, engineer managers are expected to deliver business results around motivated and engaged individuals.

How to achieve that? Focus on the system (people, process, product). Use all the tooling available to create a technical and cultural environment so that people can solve problems creatively.

Thus one-on-one meetings are the most impactful tool to build relationships, set context, manage performance with a mix of debugging, mentoring, coaching, and sponsoring so that I can influence changes on the system to achieve the goals.

What are my goals for the one on one meetings then?

1. Drive Performance: Create alignment and Continuous Feedback. Transparency on the skill matrix and leveling expectations, appreciate the good work, look for ways to signal to the engineers that you recognize their capabilities. Use group goals and incentives to foster collaboration.
2. Build Relationship: Build trust. Build safety, share vulnerability, and listen.
3. Provide Support and Growth opportunities: Tap into intrinsic motivators. Purpose, Autonomy, Mastery and remove demotivators (What gets in the way for people doing the great work.)

Start Making Your One-on-One Meetings More Meaningful provides me a simple framework to organize my meetings better to achieve my goals. In short, drive performance via accountability; build trust relationship; provide growth by motivation.

In the article, the author summaries “TAM” model as the following:

• Foster trust by kicking off with powerful, open-ended questions on how things are really going (hint: “how are you doing?” rarely solicits a genuine answer), building deeper relationships through genuine care and interest
• Encourage accountability by focusing on big, meaningful goals, asking first for them to describe what their goals are and staying at a higher level to avoid getting sucked into process and tactics
• Build motivation by asking about what’s really important and meaningful to them, as human beings; take the time to check in on goals or objectives at a personal level and identify ways to support their development

Inspired by this, the following are something I am thinking of continuing and adapting to better target these 3 pillars during one-on-ones.

1. [Accountability] Set the stage and craft the agenda for the specific goal for that meeting. Prepare more.

Tell my reports that I want our time together to be valuable, so we should focus on what’s important for them. Even though I have emphasized that one-on-one meetings are not status meetings and encourage my reports to bring their own agenda to the meetings. There are many times we still talk about project status, which we can have a separate meeting for.

So having prompts for myself and my reports on the agenda helps the meeting focused on the goals. Prepare them beforehand, such as:

Discuss top priorities:

• What’s top of mind for you right now?
• What priorities are you thinking about this week?
• What’s the best use of our time today?

Calibrate what “great” looks like:

• What is the vision that you’re working toward? Are we in sync about goals or expectations?
• Trust is also built on small things that we meet each other’s expectations continuously. Thus, be honest and transparent about my report’s performance.

Share feedback both ways:

• What feedback can you give that will help your report, and what can your report tell you that will make you more effective as a manager? What was the most useful part of our conversation today? Help people to play to their strengths.
• Once in a while, set a specific conversation for zooming out. Reflect on how things are going: Talk about my report’s general state of mind — how is he feeling on the whole? What’s making him satisfied or dissatisfied? Have any of his goals changed? What has he learned recently and what does he want to learn going forward?

2. [Motivation] Listen and understand to remove demotivators by asking questions. Continue asking a lot of questions.

3. [Trust] Genuinely curious and care for my direct report and admit my own mistakes and growth areas.

• “I don’t know the answer. What do you think?”
• “I want to come clean and apologize for what I did/said the other day. . . ”
• “One of my personal growth areas this half is . . .”
• “I’m afraid I don’t know enough to help you with that problem. Here’s someone you should talk to instead. . . ”

I will report back on how this new iteration goes!

References:

1. Jason Waller, Start Making Your One-on-One Meetings More Meaningful
2. LaraHogan, Questions for our first 1:1
3. Julie Zhuo, Chapter 3, The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You
4. Maggie Leung, These 13 Exercises Will Prepare You for Work’s Toughest Situations