Thursday is my typical one-on-one (1-1) heavy day, and today is Thursday. I met with four people in the afternoon for over 3.5 hours. I tried to be fully present when meeting such staff. I am happy with how they are going.
Encourage ownership and preparation. I have a strong relationship with each of them, which allows me to set the expectations that they drive the meeting. All of them come prepared with the topics they want to discuss.
It’s about them. I could talk about the updates at the organizational level or my thoughts on how things are going, but I try to be mindful and only do that if such updates are requested. There are other meetings and memos for such updates. I want to focus on what my reports need. The focus is on the matters they care about most, as long as we connect them to professional life.
It should cover their performance. I want to cover performance topics on each call so that my support is relevant. For the people managers, performance implies evaluation and performance of the people they support. For technical leaders, performance suggests how well they meet the expectations of their expertise.
Take your time. One mistake I usually made was to rush through too many topics, making the most of the 30-minute or 1-hour meeting. As I focus on better coaching techniques, I am aware that coaching is not a one-off thing. I prefer to cover fewer topics but more deeply rather than exploring too many topics and expecting employees to follow up.
Know the difference between outcomes and results, and make time for both. It can be tricky to tell the difference sometimes. I go back and forth between outcomes and results with good questions. For outcomes, I ask what they want to achieve. For results, I ask how they plan to measure and share back. Of course, it would be too aggressive to keep asking what you want to happen and how we know if you will be happy about it. Depending on the individuals or how long we have spent on the topic, I may make suggestions or specific requests.
Only have one-on-one meetings with people who want to talk to you and vice versa. I differentiate this meeting from other types of meetings that I have to handle a particular client feedback, team, or individual issue. My brain is now conditioned to treat each one-on-one meeting as a welcoming event. I am grateful to the people I talk to, and I always try to be in a good mood.
One area I have yet to do is asking for feedback on how I can support them better. I plan to have a monthly survey sent to people I do meetings with so that I can allow for anonymous feedback.