The 1:1 is Sacred Time

Leaders and prospective leaders, how are you managing your 1:1’s with your directs?  Do you let demands external to your team dictate if a 1:1 occurs as scheduled?  Do you all too often reschedule or eventually cancel? If these are familiar habits, you are failing your team. You're not necessarily a failed leader - but failing your team is a great first step on the road to failure as a leader.

As a leader, it is a given that you can get the attention of your team, or an individual member of your team, when needed.  Even with remote-first work, the tools of the pandemic: Slack, mobile phones and Zoom mean we can get the attention of and communicate with our team, whenever necessary - enjoying location independence.  But ask yourself is the inverse true?  If you are doing your job - managing up, managing stakeholders and leading your team - it may very well be that your calendar is a little, congested.  This means the communication channel is essentially one-way for synchronous messaging.  The 1:1 is sacred time for your directs to have your attention, and engage in meaningful conversations with you about the issues, tasks and subjects that are important to them. You get the balance of the week (I hope you’re doing weekly 1:1s) or your 1:1 interval to set the agenda as their leader.

Three Questions

In my 1:1s, all but the last 3-5 minutes are dedicated to the team member’s agenda. If we don’t have time to address the entire agenda - the meeting goes long and we cover the entire agenda. For this very reason, I don’t schedule back to back 1:1's.  The final minutes are mine and devoted to three questions:

Are you doing what you came here to do?

Anything but a yes for this answer, and it is incumbent upon me as a leader to get the team member into their target role. If they joined to work in a specific area of our data platform, and they are consumed with maintenance or support ticket work, it is critical to change course.

Are you still having fun doing that which you came here to do?

To paraphrase Nathan Arizona “we aren’t running a daisy farm”, but on-balance work should be enjoyable and yield professional satisfaction. There is no compensation remedy to create long-term retention in the face of miserable, unsatisfying work. Again, anything but a yes here and we will explore how we can correct. Sometimes we can't immediately correct, for example the tech debt bill has to be paid in full, before moving on to the interesting new project.

Other than getting approval for the new TPS Cover Sheet process, and approval to attend conference/training/etc, is there anything else that I can do for you?

You can say you’re a servant leader, or you can BE a servant leader, the choice is yours. I use this last question to summarize commitments that I made in the 1:1 - in this case a process change and educational expense approval - and then open the door for anything else that my team member may need from me. This can be scary to new servant leaders - because you will have to deliver.  Take notes here and fail to follow through and you will have closed your credibility account. Deliver for your team, and in the long run they will deliver for you.

Everyone on my current team knows their 1:1 will end with Three Questions. Some of them answer now before I ask. I have even had Slack DMs conclude with something like “Oh and on the 3 questions Yes, Yes and nope.”