How to Run a Good One-on-One Meeting
A good weekly check-in has clear expectations and, yes, an agenda
Jessica Powell, the former Google vice president who wrote The Big Disruption and told you how to quit your job, is here to answer your common but tricky work questions. Check back every other week for more management advice with a tech inflection.
I’m a new manager and I know I’m supposed to run a regular 1:1 meeting with my employees. I’ve had managers before, so have a general sense of how this goes, but would like to know the most effective ways to do this. Any tips?
I don’t have a hard and fast rule for how to run 1:1 meetings because I think the most important thing is that the 1:1 be useful to the individual employee. That means that the way you run a catch-up meeting with one direct report could be very different from how it runs with another report.
That said, I think there is a basic framework you can use when thinking about 1:1 meetings, and I think it’s fundamental to any good partnership. I used the doc service Coda to build a template you can use for thinking through your 1:1 meetings. This template is designed to 1) make clear both manager and employee expectations; 2) provide structure and focus for the 1:1 by setting an agenda; and 3) ensure that the employee’s day-to-day work…
