What to avoid on 1-on-1 meetings
A scheduled conversation, but an ongoing follow-up
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
Researching on the internet about the topic of 1 on 1 meetings, I read a lot of literature to prepare from the team member's perspective. However, not much is written in the opposite direction, with a higher focus on the manager and how these meetings are conducted.
Here let’s check the main criticized topics and practices managers do and discuss ways to avoid it.
The manager only focuses on the negatives
This is due to the way these meetings are held and little emphasis is given to the positives. As I wrote before, leadership is a very personal journey, and with time a leader develops a style to communicate and engage with the team. For new leaders, I would recommend the “Sandwich tactic”. Which is communicating one bad feedback between two positives. Of course, human nature will focus more on the negative, but to counteract this impression, spend some time on the first positive feedback, then continue to the negative or improvement point, concluding with another positive note or feedback. The goal of any 1 on 1 meeting is to address improvement points, but also for the team members to get out of the conversation motivated.
When giving good feedback, one needs to be honest. The goal is not to sugarcoat the way into the improvement point to ease the other side. Any kind of feedback meeting needs to be performed with factual information or examples in an honest conversation.
The sessions are status meetings
If a manager is using a premium team member’s time and instead having his or her opinion and feedback, by spending the meeting with a status of all the work which is ongoing, is like having a pool with 35 degrees but instead using a coke as refreshment method. Makes no sense.
It’s OK to share some status about a particular work, but the meeting can be a premium time to have some authentic feedback about the project and the overall state of affairs. The more comfortable the people are, the more authentic and unfiltered the feedback will be. This might prove to be gold data for navigating the project and team into the turbulent waters of corporate environments.
Only one person doing the talking: The Manager
The 1 on 1 meeting should be a conversation and not a solo performance by the leader. Note that not all team members are comfortable with these meetings, some of them don’t have anything to say, or simply they didn’t prepare themselves. Other team members occupy every single minute with feedback giving little room to the manager to speak. However, more times than not, one of the main criticisms done to managers is their one-sided approach. This can happen if the manager has a bunch of feedback to share and on the other side there is almost no participation. This lack of engagement can be simply a cultural or personality trait and not connected whatsoever with the motivation to be in the project.
A way to break this one-side speech is to actively ask questions, and genuinely ask for the team members’ opinions about situations that happened in the project. Depending on the quality of the link between the team member and the manager, the communication flow can be more fruitful or not. However, despite the success or shortcomings of the meeting is important to ask questions and build a rapport with the team member. It’s a cliche to say they need to feel their opinion is being heard, but it’s true.
As a conclusion
As a final note, the 1 on 1 meeting should not be an event of such importance that people are stressed to enter the room. Communication should flow during the day-to-day work and a relationship based on trust needs to be built between all parties. These meetings are simply a moment in time when people can go more in detail about their perspectives and opinions.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message on Substack.
Cheers,
Artur