How to Run a Good One-on-One Meeting
A good weekly check-in has clear expectations and, yes, an agenda
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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, which will be covered in this meeting, continues to map to the employee’s overall goals.
Take what you like, reject what you don’t! You can edit the template to make it work for you.
Expectation setting
If you’re reading this before you’ve started working with a particular employee — or you need an opportunity to reset with an existing one — use your first meeting to get a sense of what your employee is expecting from you, and also to communicate what you expect of them.
This might seem obvious, but it’s something both new and seasoned managers often miss. Remember that both you and your employee bring all your previous managerial baggage to the new relationship. If your employee’s old boss didn’t believe in regular catch-ups, or if they expected the employee to bring an update on every one of the 100 items they were working on, you can bet that’s going to inform how your…
