Last week I talked about how to have 1:1s with your boss as a manager, and months ago I wrote about the regular 1:1. Now what if you’re a manager of a manager? Obviously the 1:1 meeting is still critical to how you manage your team, but what do you talk about in these meetings?

Focus on pulling information

In these meetings, you’ll ideally want to get the managers that report to you to be able to push all the information to you, just like you aim to do with 1:1s with your boss. But we can’t demand perfection on day one. We should aim to get the managers on our team to learn the types of things that they can bring up in 1:1s through demonstration. By pulling for these pieces of information initially, they will learn the pattern and begin to more proactively push the right information to you.

How is the team doing?

The first thing to ask is how their team is doing. Each manager will have individual contributors or other managers that report to them. These team members provide the leverage that allows the manager who reports to you to drive greater value for the organization. As a manager it’s important to have some sense of how the teams are doing at each level that reports up to you. How is the team culture? Is there a strong sense of Psychological Safety? Are they working together well? Generally I would want to know the health of the teams that report to me. If the teams don’t have a healthy culture, long term their initiatives and the organization as a whole will suffer. Take your pick of long term problems at the company; reduced productivity, delayed decisions because of in-fighting, or staff turnover. They’re all expensive problems to deal with unless you catch them early.

What are they struggling with?

The next thing after the health of the teams is to find out their problems. Sure everyone is working together well, but is anything unclear to them? Have they reached a point in their work where they may need additional resources or a conversation with another stakeholder to unlock the next piece of work? There could be a number of places where the team is currently struggling.

Just like with Coaching, it’s important to remember that these are not all your problems to solve. Start off by asking how the manager or their team is currently planning on solving it. Don’t rob them of the chance to learn to solve their own problems, but also be there to provide feedback on those potential solutions.

Where can I provide enablement?

Now, there’s going to be some situations where the managers aren’t able to solve everything themselves. Here’s a few examples where a manager will require your enablement.

• Not enough authority to get cross-team resources
• Booking a meeting with someone notoriously busy
• Getting an expense approved
• Needing additional information

It’s not an exhaustive list, but there will be times where they can’t think their way out of the problem and they’ll need to borrow your authority or context to move forward. In those cases you can either approve a higher level request, get the attention of the person they need to talk to, provide additional information, or continue to run it up the ladder until you find an answer.

How clear is my communication?

One thing I like to do in my 1:1s with managers who report to me, is to pull for feedback. These managers have to take what I say and relay it to another team (and possibly more layers in the organization depending on your headcount). I always want to make sure that my messaging is clear. I’ll try to pull for this feedback in a few ways.

The first is to simply ask how clear my messaging has been. This way, if something was obviously unclear, they can just tell me plain and simple. If nothing comes to mind for them, I’ll ask about a specific situation that I may have felt iffy about. And finally, I’ll pick some messaging that I have given them and ask “tell me in your own words what I meant by that.” Asking in these 3 ways allows me to see where I was clearly not communicating well, if I am being too anxious about my communication, or if they have misunderstood me and we didn’t even realize.

Wrapping up

If you know the health of the team, their struggles (including how they plan to handle it or where you can enable their work), and that they have understood your directions, you can feel safe that they are functioning well and progressing to achieving the company’s goals.