Let’s talk about something more concrete today. The 1:1 meeting. As a manager, these meetings are some of the most important meetings you’ll have. They give you the most honest read of how your team is doing because these conversations are between you and 1 other person at a time. So what do you actually talk about in 1:1s with the individual contributors on your team?

The recurring topics

Wins

We always start with wins. Your team member should tell you about any major or minor successes they had through the week that stood out to them.

The reason why we start with wins is that it sets a positive tone for the rest of the meeting. Your team members will be riding on the good feelings from their wins and positive feedback as we move into blockers. That way we can get into the harder things with a positive attitude.

Blockers

When we talk about blockers, we look for any work that is stuck and needs intervention to unblock, any work that could be accelerated by the manager facilitating a conversation, or if everything is all good we want to hear about something that’s annoying or suboptimal.

For work that is stuck, consider using coaching principles to get your team member to unblock themselves.

For work that requires facilitation, think about who they need to be connected with, what additional context they need to make a decision, or what silos exist that prevented them from getting the information or help they needed. In the case of silos, you should also think about whether that solo should be broken down, or if that division is mostly beneficial. If you’re not sure, you can always bring it up in a 1:1 with your own boss.

Professional Development

On my team, I ask people every week what they’re doing for their professional development. Sometimes it’s a book, sometimes it’s a course, and sometimes it’s just picking up a new skill through trial and error in their regular work. All of these are worthwhile pursuits, because the individual is learning to do more with the resource available to them.

Remember, that as a manager, your main responsibility is to improve the leverage of your team. Sometimes people on my team are their own worst critics. A little while back someone on my team told me, “I didn’t really do anything for professional development this week. I set up a new spreadsheet to track XYZ by using an RSS feed.”

I made sure to remind them that they were thinking outside the box, and learned some new features of Google Sheets to set up the spreadsheet. Aside from that, they streamlined an existing process unprompted, and were working on adding more automations in the near future.

It’s important to celebrate these activities with your team members, and also to remind them of how far they’ve come. These reminders help build your relationship with team members, and also encourage them to continue developing. I know in my case that if I think back to when I started working, I didn’t know anything. The people on my team are all incredibly smart and talented, but their commitment to professional development has really blown me away over the years.

Aside from professional development activities, it’s also valuable to revisit the Career Conversations. I don’t do this every week, but when I do, I pull up the notes from the career conversation and we go through it together. I like to start by asking if the ideal futures are still the goals for this team member. Life happens, plans change. Someone who said they wanted to be a software developer 6 months ago may not necessarily still feel the same way after working at it for some time.

If the goals are the same, review how they are progressing towards developing the necessary skills for those roles. What’s going well? What’s not going well? What changes can we make to their current work to help them get on track? Is there anyone else at the company that can point them to additional resources to accelerate their journey?

If the goals aren’t the same, you’ll need to revisit the career conversations and identify some new ideal futures. In other cases, a person may not know what future they’re heading towards. This is true for a lot of people, not just the youngest new hires. In these cases, I like to give them a couple of hours a week to explore different professional development activities and develop skills. It will take some time to see a return on investment here, but once they’ve found their niche, you’ll see a renewed passion and motivation. If you’d like to try something different, I also like to ask them to think of smaller pieces than the role itself. Maybe they don’t know if they want to be a director of engineering, or a product manager, or a sales VP, but they can probably tell you about the aspects of the work.

In my case, I want to work with a team of people I trust, who are interested in the work, and generally have a positive outlook. I want to have a career with a large scope, high impact on important problems in the world. I want to stay close to the science, develop a lot of generalist skills, while also deepening my expertise. From these aspects I can start to put together a picture of an ideal future and begin to build a plan. And you can do the same for people on your team.

Wrapping up

With these recurring topics, you can provide feedback, unblock work, and develop your team. All of these activities allow you, as the manager, to improve the leverage of your team.