That Personal Touch

Meeting regularly with your direct manager is an important mechanism for ensuring your work stays customer focused, getting actionable feedback and advice, and ultimately helping you achieve your career goals. This page captures a few of my thoughts on making them effective.

Firstly, you as an individual should own these conversations. Take the lead in setting an agenda, and come prepared with discussion topics. Your leadership has limited time, so use it wisely. Frequency and duration are up to you as well, though generally I’d say more frequent and shorter is better than one marathon session per month. However, there are times when longer discussions are needed, especially when goal setting and discussing performance.

Discussion topics can vary, though generally as a manager I’m less interested in discussing status on your day-to-day tasks and projects, unless you need advice or guidance on a specific issue you’re facing. I have other mechanisms to keep tabs on project health, so I’d much rather focus on personal development and goals. That being said, if you really want to give your manager a dump of what you’re working on (or just vent) that’s fine, but be careful not to use up all your time in this way.

Finally, I recommend taking notes during all 1-on-1 discussions, and especially having a mechanism for tracking action items for both yourself and your manager. I do that on my end for all my team, and share these notes in an email after each meeting, but using something more rigorous (like a ticketing system or task board) might be even better

Possible Agendas

Here is an example agenda I’ve used successfully:

• Highlight / lowlight since we last talked
• How can I help you this upcoming week?
• What’s the status of your current annual goals?
• Open discussion (you pick the topic)

And another agenda that also works well:

• Personal check-in: how are you feeling?
• Quick updates
  • Previous 1-on-1 action items
  • Tasks and projects
  • Current goals
• Discuss current challenges and potential solutions
• Recognize successes with gratitude
• Create and review action items

And a third one:

• Personal check-in
• Task/project/goal progress
• Review of priorities
• Workload and expectations
• Blockers
• Feedback
• Concerns

Discussion Questions

These are some questions I like to ask during a first 1-on-1 to learn more about how a person prefers to be managed:

• What do you most need from me as a manager?
• How do you prefer to receive feedback? In writing? In person? Another way?
• How can I know when you’re struggling and need help?
• Are there any manager behaviors that particularly bother you? If so, how can I avoid them?
• What ongoing 1-on-1 cadence would be most helpful for you?

More generally, these are question I ask to help me as a manger how to make work more enjoyable:

• What motivates you to perform at your best?
• What do you wish you could spend more (or less) time doing?
• At the end of the month/quarter/year, what would you like to say you’ve accomplished?
• At the end of your career, what would you like to say you’ve accomplished?
• If you could change one thing about work that would improve your life, what would it be?

These questions help me ascertain and guide someone’s career growth:

• What impact do you think you’ve had so far? What additional impact would you like to have?
• What aspects of your role do you love (or hate) and why?
• What are you learning, and how are you growing here?
• Is there a new project you’d like to work on? Or new goal you’d like to work towards?
• What do you need training on? What do you need experience in?

Finally, these are question I ask to get feedback on my own performance as a manager:

• How can the team improve its communication?
• How can I help you be more successful?
• How can we help you do more of what you enjoy?
• How am I doing? What can I be doing better?