Toward Mindful 1:1s
A simple strategy to make the most of your 1:1s
Do you dread 1:1s as this unwelcome interruption that pulls you from behind your IDE into this zone of discomfort that feels pointless? Or perhaps, as a manager, you stare at a stream of recurring 1:1 events on your weekly calendar and dread how you will get through them.
If I believed we were already robots, I would recommend simply switching to in-the-moment feedback, ala 1-minute manager, and doing away with scheduled 1:1s. But then, we are emotional beings, driven by aspirations, and whether we like it or not, our professional relationships thrive on finding common ground with respect to expectations, just like any other relationship. And this requires deeper, more intimate discussions - and no, you aren’t about to replace your manager with an LLM.
What to seek from a 1:1
As a manager
If you are a manager, the 1:1 serves as a platform for getting the best out of someone on the team. You will typically want to spend your time on the following areas with a team member that reports to you. Let’s call this person a ward, because they are in your charge, from an org perspective.
Skills: Which skills are serving your ward well, which ones need to be developed, and a development plan that helps achieve this.
Career: Appreciating the aspirations of your ward, and charting as well as actively navigating a course to help them fulfil these.
Feedback: Seeking as well as sharing feedback that improves your working relationship, makes you a better manager and makes your ward a better professional.
Wellbeing: Appreciating how work conditions affect your ward and working toward designing an optimal work environment that best balances the needs of your ward and the needs of the team at large.
As a reportee
As a reportee, the 1:1 mainly comes down to,
Coaching: To gauge whether you are headed in the right direction, and how you can simultaneously improve yours and your oganization’s lot. If you are blessed, you find a mentor in your manager who can even set you up for success beyond the four walls of the organization.
Managing expectations: The foundation of a great relationship is made with expectations that match. Your manager is your window to the org’s expectations on you. What outcomes are achievable, what incentives you seek, and how you expect your manager to help you make up your discussions around expectations.
The common problem with 1:1s
We often find ourselves, as a manager or a ward, entering into a scheduled 1:1 conversation with scant idea of what to get out of them. As a result, we start discussing whatever is top of mind. If you’re lucky, this is a recent project or something you were working on right before the 1:1. If you aren’t, this could simply be something or someone that has been getting on your nerves recently. Before you know it, time’s up, one of you feels relieved while the other rushes back to the comfort of their IDE or their Inbox, while neither feels any the wiser.
It is up to you to take control of this valuable time you spend on a 1:1 and make it count. As with so many things in life, a little bit of preparation goes a long way.
A continuous conversation
For as long as you work together, consider the 1:1 as this ongoing conversation, that is broken up across time, usually scheduled ahead of time, and often artificially constrained by a clock. It is a conversation about making things better, together, while many other things are going on in our busy lives.
Whether you meet weekly or monthly, picking up where you left off is always going to be tricky. Similarly, continuing on to something relevant, rather than the flavor of the moment, decides how well you utilize the time slice this time around.
There is a very simple hack to help with this - running notes.
Before the 1:1
Create a document shared between just the two of you, ideally linked from the calendar invite. Name it using a conjunction of both your names (say Luke/Yoda).
Put the date of the next scheduled 1:1 on top, and jot down bullets of the topics you’d like to discuss on this date (say experience with Project Death Star).
Invite your fellow traveler to add their bullets (say learning to fly low in an X-wing).
Whenever something flashes past your mind, reminding you to make this a part of the next conversation, type the name of the document (your names) in the browser address bar to quickly access the notes, and add this as a bullet for the next catch-up.
During the 1:1
Pull up the quickly accessed notes and quickly decide which of these points you’d like to prioritize for the conversation this time.
Put the date of your next auspicious sync-up on top of the document.
If action items are identified for either of you, quickly and briefly add them under this future date.
See if there were action items from last time that you wanted to follow-up on.
Practice active listening. No, really. Put that phone away. Close Slack. Pay attention to each other!
When time runs out, move the topics you couldn’t cover this time around to your next date.
What makes this hack work?
Agenda: We lead busy lives. Who has the time to prepare an agenda for a 1:1, let alone 10 if you’re a manager? The running notes serve as a starting point for an agenda that you can quickly coordinate and create at the start of your next 1:1.
Free your mind: When something is nagging you and you think your manager or ward needs to hear it, but this is not “just in time” feedback and instead requires conversation that can wait, writing this down in your shared notes can create a promise that resolves itself in the future. Your brain has dumped its worry and can move on, for now.
Sense of continuity: As opposed to a set of random happenstances, your 1:1s start to get a semblance of a flow, like a real conversation.
Handling context: Especially if you are a manager, keeping 10 different such conversations flowing across time and face(s) is an ordeal. Notes are your swap space.
Keep it terse: All you need is enough to trigger your memory of the details, not the details themselves. If you are meeting regularly, you will remember the details. The idea is to make this effortless, not to keep a journal.
Manager Bonus: Time for your annual review ritual? Need to write up an essay on the progress of your ward? That timeline of progress lives in your shared running notes, in reverse chronological order.
I am sure your next 1:1 is right around the corner. Try this hack out and let me know what it does for your conversation. I would love to hear from multiple practitioners!