Having More Impactful One-on-Ones

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Years ago I had a guitar teacher that was renowned around the local music scene for his incredible blues guitar skills, and I was incredibly excited to take my guitar playing to the next level. The first lesson didn’t go very well… nor did the second, or the third… and pretty soon I was wondering if I was getting anything out of these lessons. The strange thing is that I knew others taking lessons from him that raved about how productive and awesome they were.

So what gives?

Well, in retrospect I realize the problem was that neither one of us had the skillset for driving a productive lesson. As a student I could’ve driven a productive lesson by coming there with an agenda of what I wanted to learn and work on, but I wasn’t a good enough guitarist to realize what I didn’t know. All I knew was that I wasn’t great and I wanted to get better. Unfortunately, this guitarist didn’t seem to know which questions to ask to figure out what it was I didn’t know. He didn’t seem to know how to benchmark my current level or to diagnose where my biggest opportunities for growth. So, every week pretty much went like this:

Teacher: Hey Justin! What do you want to learn today?

Me: I don’t really know.

Teacher: You didn’t come with anything?

Me: I’m just not sure what I need to work on to get better. I was hoping you’d know.

Teacher: (frustrated sigh) Well… ah… here, I guess we can work on what I did with the last student.

And that’s pretty much how every week went. You’d think I would’ve gotten smarter and started coming prepared, but the only way I could think to deal with it was to switch to a different guitar teacher.

That worked.

Without changing my approach at all with the new guitar teacher, I could just show up with no agenda and he’d immediately have me try to play something, diagnose what I needed to work on, and we’d spend our time on that. I started getting better and loved my guitar lessons.

My experiences with these two guitar teachers reminds me a lot of my experiences in 1:1s with my team. It’s easy as a manager to run a 1:1 when your team member comes in with a laundry list of agenda items and a clear idea of exactly what they want to work on (I always set the expectations with my team members that the 1:1 is their meeting that they set the agenda for). It takes a good set of tools, however, for a manager to drive a productive 1:1 when the team member comes in with no agenda items and nothing on their mind. Yes, it’s fine if this happens occasionally, but if it becomes a trend, that’s when it’s time to start pulling out our managerial toolbox of good questions to ask.

Jason Lauritsen has a great article on this: 24 Questions to Ask in Your Next 1:1 Meeting.

His top 5 are:

  1. What is the most important thing we need to discuss today?

  2. What are your most significant accomplishments since we last met?

  3. What are the most important things you will focus on before we meet next?

  4. What obstacles are you encountering right now?

  5. What can I do better or differently as your manager to support you?

It’s tempting to allow an unproductive trend of 1:1s continue, after all, it’s their meeting not yours, and there are about 20 other tasks on your to-do list you could choose to knock out by ending the 1:1 early, but I urge you to fight the temptation. Develop a list of your go-to questions to really dig into where your team needs help growing, and ask them to commit to something by next 1:1—it’ll lead to better team culture, greater growth, and more impactful outcomes for the entire team.

To read more about this, I highly recommend The Coaching Habit, by Michael Bungay Stanier.

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