Template for effective 1on1 for leaders
Last quarter I spent some time understanding the purpose of 1on1 and improving my 1on1s with my direct reports. I read several resources around it and collected some feedback from my network.
To sum up, in short, 1on1 meetings are your direct reports’ meetings.
The meetings are to
- Build relationship and mutual trust between you and direct reports
- Add value to them by understanding their need, roadblocks, giving feedback and receiving feedback
Best 1on1s are led by your reports, but in reality, it is not that simple. It is easy to forget adding 1on1 meeting agenda when someone is building solutions that matter to them. I prefer a balance of 70% of the agenda coming from the reports, 30% by the manager on average.
I have started using Asana with the below sections to enable my reports to come up with an agenda for the meeting quickly in advance.
The template goal is to help my reports lead 1on1 and make it effective(and not efficient).
1. What’s top of your(report’s) mind?
The question helps to start a chat that quickly turns into a real conversation. The question is quite open and covers various aspects. The question is used by Facebook to encourage its users to write posts for a long time. Your reports can share topics consuming their mental space and energy either pleasantly or unpleasantly professionally and personally.
Some examples of what can be discussed
- Project’s progress
- Relationship with teammates, other team’s engineers, customers
- Plan for a vacation to recharge batteries
2. Last week(s)’s wins
The section enables your reports to share positive outcomes of hard work. The more details a report share with you, the more you are aware of their contributions. It will help you to avoid surprises at performance reviews.
The section also gives you an opportunity to realign and share clear expectations in the case wins are not aligned.
Some examples of weekly win
- Last week I was able to resolve some critical bugs which were blockers for booking new items. I found that we were lacking unit tests and I have added unit tests to make sure that we do not encounter the same incident again.
- Last week I shared my learnings of the new helm deployment pipeline with other engineers and now they feel confident about changing CI/CD pipelines on their own.
- We were able to get our ADR(Architecture Design Record) approved for the scalability of our microservices last week. I am happy for my contribution of “Validating Redis as an in-memory caching” in the ADR.
3. Challenges and concerns
The section is to enable your reports to share project/team/organization/personal challenges and concerns. The section is to ask for help for removing roadblocks and enabling them to achieve.
If there are some action items from the section, add a task in the “Action items” section and create an impeccable agreement by clearly defining the action item, doer and due date.
Some examples
- I am concerned that our team will not be able to achieve the targeted 80% OKR.
- I am concerned that the user acceptance criteria are not clearly defined for the epic and we might not able to meet user expectations
- It is challenging for me to thoroughly understand the new CI/CD workflow. Can you help me with some documentation or pair me with an SRE?
4. Feedback
Feedback is a gift, not a whip or a carrot. The section is to share and receive feedback. The section will enable your reports to ask for feedback and align with expectations and give you feedback to lead the team better.
Some examples
- What is your feedback for my demonstrated ownership in “new booking funnel” KR?
- Your last initiative of team-building did not clearly share where our team is lacking and what is expected from everyone. I will suggest you to communicate your expectation clearly.
5. Career Goal(s)
Setting career goal(s) will be easy after your reports have a vision and purpose for professional life. The vision could be “become a CEO of a company and fights global warming” or “I would like to enjoy my job and work reasonable hours to spend time with my family”.Both of them are correct as far as THEY made the choice.
After setting a vision, you can onboard your reports to share SMART goals for their careers.
The section will act as a reminder to check progress and roadblocks against the career goal(s).
6. Action Items
The section is to create impeccable action items by clearly defining description, doer and due date from the 1on1 conversation
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