Effective One-on-One Meetings

We can’t overstate the importance of one-one-one (1–1s) meetings with our employees and team members. They are a essential tool for building a solid working relationship. However, many managers consider them useless or make them feel like a burden they just need to bear.

In my personal practice as a software development leader, I tried different approaches and also thoroughly studied best practices from different sources, for example:

• The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change book by Camille Fournier
• Coaching Skills for Managers Specialization by Coursera
• Leading People and Teams Specialization by Coursera
• Google Re:work — Tool: Hold effective 1:1 meetings

What I found is that structured and consistent process produces the best results.

According to Google “Project Oxygen” study, the Google team confirms that:

their higher-scoring managers are more likely than lower-scoring managers to have frequent 1:1 (“one-on-one”) meetings with their team members. Meeting frequently and individually with team members can require a large time investment, but can identify issues early and provides a forum for the manager to give feedback and guidance.

So in this post, I’d like to share some perspectives and thoughts on one-on-ones and suggest practices that could make them meaningful and effective.

Introduction

Roughly speaking, 1–1s fulfill two primary functions:

1. Creating a personal connection with your employees. I’m not assuming that we have to talk the entire 1–1 meeting about private matters, anecdotes from personal lives or families. That said, mutual sharing of personal stuff in a sensible way is still important, because it could provide a useful context when something stressful or unexpected happens.
2. Setting a consistent coaching agenda. Role-based KPIs and personal goals are crucial drivers of employee development and growth. Therefore, setting clear and measurable goals has to be part of every coaching agenda. Every employee deserves a honest and timely feedback about his performance and you can make goals-oriented 1–1s to be a solid platform for providing it.

Using Performance KPIs

In this section, we will discuss how to set key performance indicators (KPIs) to effectively track performance and how that helps us with our coaching practice.

Let’s start with the basics: you can not effectively manage people if you can not measure their performance.

There are tons of articles and publications about the importance of setting measurable goals and there is a good reason for that. Without KPIs and S.M.A.R.T goals, it’ll just get to be really subjective (or “intuition” based as we may say) and ineffective really quick.

Many of us who do not work in environments where KPIs are designed or created on our behalf. Nevertheless, even in such organizations, we can think of a few KPIs for every position, some are just easier to distill than others.

So we can start with introspection of the employee role, how does his role contribute to the overall success of the organization, what are the key elements that we can use, in order to determine the viability and the health of this role.

These are KPIs we can track.

For software engineers, it could be as simple as velocity or how many story points are completed or how many errors or bugs are made in their work.

And then it might get more complex. How well are they collaborating with other teams or contributing to cross-organizational projects?

At the end of the day, every role exists to solve a particular problem. So the question we can ask ourselves is: how well they are solving that problem?

Once we identified relevant KPIs, we need to make sure that we calibrated them with the people, so that they understand and agree with them. Then we can start using it in 1–1s, as tool for tracking and measuring employee’s performance.

Goals and Performance

So how goals are different from KPIs you may ask. The difference is simple.

KPIs are used to measure a role contribution to the organization. Everyone in the same role could have the same KPIs. Conversely, goals are individual and they are used to measure and build someone’s performance within the structure of the role.

So if I have a junior software engineer, his goals will be different, comparing to senior software engineer or someone who’s been in this position long time, even though the function is the same.

Moreover, we can differentiate between productivity goals and development goals.

Productivity goals are very task-oriented and related to something that needs to be done on a regular basis.

Development goals on the other hand are those that designed to develop employee experience or skills.

Let’s take as an example a role of product manager and his productivity goal is to produce a list of features to be developed every sprint. This productivity goal requires gathering, prioritizing and coordinating information from customers and various stakeholders within the organization.

And let’s say we’re working with someone who is not consistently producing this list. The features are incomplete and missing important technical pieces or are not produced on time.

There can be a lot of reasons for that, but our job is to figure out how to help him to improve this process. That might be anything, starting from prioritization skills to the communication skills. So in this case, we can establish development goals related to prioritization and communication abilities.

So to summarize: we use KPIs and goals to measure performance and identify issues. KPIs are more generic and apply to everyone in a specific role, so they’re not tailored individually to employee strengths or improvement areas. Goals, on the other hand, are unique and designed to develop specific skill and behavior.

1–1 Meetings Consistency

In this section I’d like to emphasize the importance of having consistent 1–1’s and the issues that can arise if you don’t exercise it.

Let’s start with some basic question: why consistency is so important? I think the answer is obvious. We all want to know what to expect. It gives us and our employees predictability and confidence. On the flip side of the coin, an inconsistent workplace is a breeding ground for confusion, which causes anxiety and uncertainty.

As managers, we should strive to create a structure that helps our employees to know what to expect. They know when they will have time with us and despite what we think, employees like time with their managers. Even if we don’t have outstanding relationships, they like the opportunity to talk about their concerns, get through tasks and address their questions.

The other major advantage of having a consistent 1–1s is that it decreases ad-hoc interruptions. If our team members know that they are going to have a meeting with us every Monday at 1:00, often some of those things that seem really urgent to them will wait, since they know they’ll be able address them when they meet with us, instead of “bugging” us with every question that may or may not be super urgent.

Having a consistent 1–1s schedule really helps us manage our time better and also helps employees know what to bring to us and what could wait until the next meeting.

So to summarize:

Missing 1–1’s or not having a consistent practice, may get us to the place, where we don’t really know what’s going on with our team.

We might be good at having larger meetings with the entire team, but this one-on-one time is where we really are able to connect with our team members and identify potential issues that might just be surfacing.

As managers, we don’t want to be caught off guard or be surprised, and having a consistent 1–1s allow for that. It allows for us to connect and understand what’s going on.

Lastly and most importantly, not having a consistent 1–1’s means a disconnection.

As Kris Plachy stated in her course “ Coaching practices”:

People want to believe that what they do — matters.

They want to work with people that care about them.

They want to have authentic connections.

When people are disconnected from their manger who has most profound and direct impact on their careers, it causes disengagement.

As the saying goes:

“People leave managers, not companies”

so, not connecting with people poses a big risk of eventually loosing them.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.