Template for 1-1

During my work as a manager, I’ve clearly realized the following facts:

1. Know your employee as a human. We are not robots, but humans! To manage successfully, you need to know your employee not as a worker only, but human. You need to know their personal goals, motivators because it’s closely linked with your success.
2. Help employees with their goals to reach yours. Connect them. The story of successful/not successful management is about how the goals of you and employee fit to each other. To manage employees, you have to help with their goals. To make your goals to be reached – link your goals with the goals of employees. It’s applicable for short and long-term goals.
3. Bidirectional feedback makes work more efficient. It adds a self-improving mechanism to communication with employees, which also improves work efficiency, make it predictable. As a part of it creates convenient and less stressful work environment for all sides. Read the book “Radical Candor” for more explanations.
4. Action, Action, Action! All the previous is excellent, but will not work if all of this will be not supported/transformed into actions which will be finally done and make all of these happen, no on words!

As an important instrument to cover all of these things is 1–1 Meetings with employees.

In this post, I want to share with you my insights and Template, which significantly increased the value of such meetings for me.

I heard many positive feedbacks from colleagues and finally decided to share it with the wider community.

Let’s start with few insights:

1. 1-1 should be NOT mixed with status call with employee. It should be a separated meeting in time because it’s hard to change mind quickly: from work goals and tasks to personal goals and motivators, from reporting to communication as a partner etc.
2. 1-1 should be regular and NOT be skipped. Sometimes for employees and managers, it looks like nothing to discuss. Usually, it’s a wrong feeling because of different factors. It can be because meetings are too frequent: I suggest doing it at least 1 per month, with frequency convenient for both sides: when they have something to discuss. It can also be because it’s hard to start with something: employee and manager have no points to start with, not clear what really can be discussed. In this case, my template below will be pretty helpful. Meetings should be regular because it should be never ending, iterative work on improvements.
3. 1-1 will NOT work if no trust between employee and manager. 1-1 should be a place when sides talk more like a trusted partner: share feedback, goals, concerns, objections in both directions. If no trust – the value of 1-1 meeting is not clear it all. As a result, managers should prepare a trustful and safe environment for subordinates (see Radical Candor book for ideas how to do it).

I like to do 1-1 in face-to-face format with coffee in cozy place 😉

Finally, let me share the template which can be used to manage 1–1 meetings with exact employee.

It contains the following useful info separated by tabs:

1. Possible Agenda of 1-1 step by step with possible timing
2. Motivation Check where employees can easily identify and share their motivation in details
3. Action Items log to keep them in mind and track their state
4. Long-term Agreements contains important agreements which important to know and support on a long distance.
5. Career Path high-level description
6. 1-1 History & Feedback to store Manager<>Employee feedback and also motivation points – to see dynamic

Enjoy!

Great insights from Template: since you can measure the motivation of your employees, you can gather this information from your sub-managers (if any) and analyze their results. It increases visibility across your organization retention of employees, resolve their blockers quicker. I’ve created a matrix for all employees in the organization and tracked it on monthly basis.

Additionally, to these, you can create a repeatable checklist which be launched automatically before1-1 to be ready for both sides. It can be easily automated in checklist-based Process Management Tool checkflow.io. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you need help with it.

Side note: additionally, to my personal experience, it’s also based on:

• A fantastic list of motivation factors and idea how to work with it was provided by the coach of Stratoplan management school.
• Ideas from Radical Candor book by Kim Scott.