How to Have Effective One on One meetings With Your Team

Regular one-on-one meetings with your teams can help your employees feel valued and appreciated, as a manager you also get a sense of how work is being managed.

With a proper framework and agenda, a manager can get insights into employees' deliverables, and potential roadblocks as you guide them to greater success. One-on-one meetings also provide a chance for managers to get to know their employees more personally.

How often Should you meet?

One-on-one meetings can be used to get a pulse on your employees’ well-being and experience at the company. The frequency of the meeting should be predetermined by both parties and scheduled accordingly. In the initial stages of any project. Weekly meetings are advisable to keep track of progress on deliverables and to show support for the work being done. However, once you have created a rhythm then the frequency can be reduced.

Make sure to add a recurring meeting to the calendar. This is a subtle but straightforward way for managers to show that they are invested. It helps to show the commitment to consistently be available for the individual. Things come up and schedules change. But instead of canceling or trying to cover off in Slack, do your best to reschedule. Canceling can send the message that the meeting is not important, when in fact, it is the cornerstone of your relationship with your direct report.

What should you talk about?

As a manager or leader, you should encourage your direct reports to share what they would like to discuss. Common topics include growth and career aspirations, current or future projects, recent feedback, reviews, recognition, alignment, or roadblocks

With preparation and a collaborative agenda, your regular meetings can be effective and bear great results. Important touchpoints and crucial action items are to be on the agenda for a successful meeting.

Here is a basic framework to ensure that your meeting is not long-winded, and objectives are sufficiently covered

Pre-populating the agenda

ensures you cover priority topics. Make a shared agenda to not only provide context before the meeting but allow both parties to take ownership of the meeting.

Preparing for the meeting ahead of time allows you to eliminate spending time on background information and immediately get to the things that matter. Structure and guidance make the meeting constructive, and a lot can be said with a time-managed agenda.

Icebreaker questions,

Always have icebreaker questions that will put your employee at ease before you get into the agenda. Here are some questions you might try:

• How are you feeling?

• What is on your mind?

• What are you most excited about?

• What are you most worried about?

What should you expect from your team members?

An important aspect of being a manager is to make sure your employees feel heard, safe, and empowered. Once you have fully heard them, help be a facilitator of solutions. Uncover what they are excited about, how you can mentor them to be successful,

Here are some tactics to ensure you create a space of trust:

• Affirm their perspective first

• Disclose your weaknesses, places where you have stumbled

• Be unconditionally on their side/team, even (and especially) when giving them blunt feedback about opportunities for growth

• Respect them as a person, not just a performer of tasks; treat them as a peer

What practical ideas can help get the best out of your team members?

• Insist on excellence

Monitor your team’s performance, as a whole and on an individual level. Do not overlook mediocrity but communicate with your team members to identify problem areas and establish strategies to overcome these and maximize performance.

• Establish trust

A team relies heavily on trust – trust in the skills of each other, trust in their manager to guide them to success, and trust in the processes and systems to help them get there.

• Develop strong relationships

Building rapport between team members as well as between yourself as a manager and those you lead is a critical success factor. Recognize the importance of personal lives, provide regular feedback, and organize team-building activities to promote strong internal relations.

• Be organized

People perform better when they know what they are aiming for. Set clear long and short-term goals for each employee, which will in turn aid your team in reaching collective goals and organizational goals. Enforce deadlines, track performance, and analyze each team members’member’s progress, providing them with tools and support if they need help to achieve their targets.

• Mix it up

Establish a team that compliments each other’s strengths. A team does not function as effectively if it lacks diversity. Different personalities, key skill sets, and individual strengths must be considered when assembling and optimizing a team, as these all contribute to overall success. Each team member needs to understand their unique role in the group.

• Exploit potential

Empower your employees by delegating tasks aligned with their strengths and try to give them a bit more than you know they can achieve to challenge, motivate, and encourage them to perform to their true potential.

• Reward and recognize

A sense of accomplishment is a large contributor to job satisfaction, and everyone likes to be told they are doing an excellent job. Recognizing achievements sustains high performance and inspires the rest of the team to go beyond too.

Hosting effective one-on-one meetings is the key to changing the way you manage and connect with your teammates, and it enables you to empower your teammates to take responsibility for their work. There are endless benefits to the continuous and honest feedback given in a 1:1 both for a manager and team members. Bringing out the best in your employees, eliminating unnecessary tension, improving workflow, pulsing your team’s energy level, and making your employees feel valued are just a few reasons to find the time on your calendar for your next 1:1