A 12-points Template for Conducting 1:1 with Direct Reports at Work
Kindness, caring, respect and trust are foundational elements that I prioritize when interacting with colleagues and, more importantly, with my team.
“Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed.” — Abraham Lincoln
I joined my team at TELUS Agriculture and Consumer Goods during the first week of 2022 as a team lead. This is the first time in my career that I’m occupying a full time position where leadership occupies a bigger part of my time at work. Whereas in my past technical roles I could consider the machine as a tool expecting to simply receive a command and provide a result, I knew that this mindset wouldn’t work with people because, simply put, people are not machines. People are people. They’re individuals with a heart, a mind and an identity of their own. As a team lead, my mindset had to change to one where kindness, caring, respect and trust were the fundamental elements that would guide how I would work and communicate with my colleagues, but more importantly, with my team.
Part of my job consists in knowing how my teammates are doing on both a personal and professional level on a regular basis. I achieve this through 1:1 sessions with them for which I invite them to tell me how often they’d like to meet: every two weeks for half an hour or once a month for an hour. Given the amount of work that occupies their days, the option to meet every month for an hour was chosen unanimously.
In order to make the best of that hour, I came up with a template that would help me guide the conversation all the way from the personal side of the individual to what I can do to help them improve in the form of 12 points.
If you’re interested in starting from a template to conduct your 1:1 sessions to truly know and help your colleagues have fun at work, and continuously improve at the same time, I hope this template will be useful to you.
Ready?
Here. We. Go.
1. How are you doing on a personal level?
I start with this question because if the person isn’t in a positive state of mind or heart outside of work, chances are that she won’t be as effective at work. This also prepares me to expect a lower efficiency from the person because of something that she’s going through, and that’s okay because without knowing or needing to know the intricate details about her situation, I know enough to expect that her efficiency this week or sprint might not be optimal. And that’s fine. This also tells me that I shouldn’t assign the person with work that has a high priority associated to it because it might cause added stress to the person and the team should the work not be delivered at the expected time. At this point, I just want to know how the person is doing, and hoping that she’s doing okay. If she’s not, I’ll ask her to let me know how I can help, what she needs from the team to help her in her situation, and I’ll invite her to get in touch with me anytime that she wants to talk about it.
2. How are you doing on a professional level?
After knowing how the person is doing on a personal level, I’m interested in knowing how she’s doing on the professional side of things. For example, I would ask her to summarize in a few words how the past month at work felt for her. While listening to her speak, I take notes that would later serve as action items on my part to make sure that whatever needs to change or improve on behalf on my direct report at work happens.
3. What motivated you this past month at work?
I strongly believe that motivation is the fuel that gets us to start something. Without motivation, it’s as if there’s a “cold start” period that makes us linger before actually start doing something. Let’s call this procrastination.
The antidote to procrastination is motivation. — Me. I said that.
This question bubbles up the elements that motivate the individual to do good work, and I want to know what they are, so that I can reproduce them for others when needed. My mind being continuously geared towards improvement, and because I don’t know everything and never will know everything, I depend on other people’s feedback to build a library of good ideas that I can later share with others.
4. What didn’t motivate you enough or challenged you enough at work, but that you still spent time on?
This question is the antithesis of the previous one, and it’s an important question because I want to reduce as much as possible, or even completely remove, whatever caused the person not to be motivated enough to work on an assigned task. Perhaps the work description wasn’t clear, concise or complete? Or maybe it’s because I assigned a type of work that the individual didn’t have the knowledge or ability to perform adequately? Though I let the person know that just as we sometimes have to include vegetables on our plate to get a balanced meal, we shouldn’t expect to have candy-like work in front of us all the time. If a work seems boring to the point that it doesn’t motivate the person to work on it, I invite her to think about ways that we can make it interesting. Perhaps we could document the work differently, or maybe we can automate it in such a way that we never have to do it manually again? Whatever it is, I’m noting down her points to avoid creating an environment that would give birth to non-motivating work as much as possible.
5. What do you need to have a higher level of satisfaction at work?
I think that it’s pretty evident that in the world of IT, employees can jump ship to work in more interesting projects or companies in a rapid pace. This mostly happens when the satisfaction at work is below what each employee expects for herself. So at this point of the meeting, I want to know what I can do, on behalf of the company, to provide her with a higher level of satisfaction at work than in the previous month. Anything goes here. I’m open to any ideas that the person might have. Work has to and needs to be interesting because it tends to occupy a very big part of our time, and time is a finite resource that we can never get back. So let’s see how we can best invest our time by creating and nurturing an environment that would contribute to the person’s satisfaction at work.
6. What are some ideas you have now that you’d like us to try implementing in our team?
This question has brought forth a few activities in our team, such as quarterly team building activities, monthly happy hour sessions where we chillax for an hour with the development team to talk about the latest books they read, etc. At this time, I want to hear out the person for things that we are currently doing that can be improved, or perhaps simply removed in the process. In short, I’d like for us to improve the process of how we do work. If the process is working, then fine there’s no point in changing it. Otherwise, let’s see what we can try to change. If it works, great! And if it doesn’t, well, failure is the greatest teacher in life, so there’s that.
7. What are some things you’d change to improve your or the team’s psychological safety?
I believe that this one is the most important, yet sometimes hard, question to ask. You see, I want to create a work environment where what makes us feel respected, cared for and listened to abound. People being complex beings, I don’t think that it’s possible to create the perfect environment for everyone, but I do believe that we can strive for one that would tick most of our checkmarks to make us feel and be psychologically strong at work. I want my teammates to be excited for the good work they’ll do before they start their shifts, but also be excited for the next day when their shifts end.
8. What are some things you’d change to improve your or the team’s efficiency?
This question helps to know whether the person has what she needs to do good work for our client. Is her computer fast enough for work? Does she require a license to a specific software to be more efficient? Does she need training for a specific technology or business subject to understand how to perform the work? Efficiency is something that I think of constantly at work. How I can be more efficient today than yesterday? How can I prepare myself to be more efficient tomorrow than I am today? What are some things that I should break, change, add or remove that would help me be more efficient? This helps me to look for any activity that can be considered to be a status quo (i.e., daily standups, UI/wireframe sessions, etc.) because we’re used to do it like this or like that for a long time, so that we can improve it somehow: perhaps in reducing the time it takes to do that activity, or by changing the way we prepare meetings in advance, etc.
9. What are some things you’d change to improve your or the team’s confidence?
A confident team is one where everyone knows what needs to be done to get to the destination in time. This question helps me to know what we can do better to increase the person or the team’s confidence in our project. For example, an idea that came out from a 1:1 session was taking the time to properly describe the user story during tech refinement sessions. Therefore, I now take the time to include a context (why we’re doing this), a problem statement (what do we need to solve), who’s impacted by the problem (for whom are we solving this problem?), etc. Given that we all work remotely in my team, proper communication is key to success, so the better that we communicate, the better that we get to work together, and the more confidence we have amongst ourselves. Speaking of communication (no pun intended), I want to emphasize that verbal communication isn’t the only way we use to communicate with each other; we author many technical articles that help us solve repetitive work, we present training materials that help us understand complex scenarios that a subject matter expert (SME) might possess, etc.
10. What are some things you’d change to improve your or the team’s energy?
Let’s be honest for a minute. We can’t always be full of energy to constantly do work every day of the week for the rest of the year. However, we can find ways to make work fun, but also ways that we can incorporate in our personal or professional lives to keep up a good level of energy at work. For example, one thing that we changed from this feedback is changing our business and technical refinement sessions from afternoon to morning instead. These are important meetings where we plan the work for future sprints, and, without knowing why, after 2 PM most of our brains are quite fried. So, we changed that. We made it work for us. Those meetings are now done an hour before lunch. And we tend not to book meetings in the afternoon. This formula works for us now. The moment that it won’t work for us anymore, we’ll change it. The status quo mindset has no place in our team.
11. What can I, as your team lead, do for you until our next 1:1 meeting?
Part of the reason that I love my work is because I have the complete confidence of my manager. Therefore, when I ask this question to my teammate, I can ask it confidently because if I can’t provide what she needs, I know that I can go a higher level up in the organization to present her need and have someone helping me with it. There’s no limit here. Whatever I can do or provide to my teammate, if it’s sincere and doable, I’ll do it. Just because our 1:1 session is about to end, that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop caring for her professional life until the next month.
12. What can I improve to be a more effective team lead?
I finish with this one because it concerns me. I also want to improve as a team lead, and because I can’t see myself past my nose, I depend on my teammates’ feedback to help me with this. Perhaps I should slow down when I’m talking? Or perhaps I should do a better job in describing in advance what our next meeting will be about? Just because I’m doing something now, I can’t confidently know that I’m doing it in a way that is good or efficient. This is why I rely on my teammates’ feedback to help me get back on the road that I’m supposed to be, so that in return I can help them get back on the road that they’re supposed to be too.
Conclusion
And there you go. Those are 12 questions that I ask every month in my 1:1 sessions with my direct reports. I should also add that we have consultants working with us too, and I do these sessions with them as well, because they matter to me. Regardless of your role or title, if you care about improving yourself on a professional level, I’ll make space in my calendar for you. The reason for that is simple: many men and women have done the same thing for me when I was starting out in the industry.
If, like me, you’re starting out in the management track of the profession, I encourage you to set proper meetings with your direct reports, so that you can help them grow, and in return they can do the same for you.
