5 Practices for Effective One-on-One Meetings

One-on-one meetings are fundamental to build a high performance team that can scale to meet business needs and contribute to an organization’s growth. 

Most managers understand the importance of these meetings and yet they either deprioritize them or run them ad hoc without proper planning or paying attention to their effectiveness. 

They treat them like an item on the todo list, which feels good once ticked without adding any value to the team’s learning and growth. 

Not having these discussions is definitely bad, but it’s even worse when these meetings leave people feeling confused, overwhelmed or agitated because their managers are either unprepared or don’t know how to run them well. 

Meetings are at the heart of an effective organization, and each meeting is an opportunity to clarify issues, set new directions, sharpen focus, create alignment, and move objectives forward.
— Paul Axtell, Meetings Matter

Use these 5 practices to run effective one-on-one meetings:

Be a human, not a robot

Many managers set strict professional boundaries and don’t make an attempt to know their direct reports beyond work. 

They talk work all the time—requirements, deadlines, expectations. To them nothing else matters. Engaging in small talk or discussing anything that doesn’t involve work seems like a waste of time because they don’t understand the value in building a personal connection and getting a peek into their team’s life outside of work.  

Your reports are real human-beings with emotions, desires and dreams. They have a life beyond work. Treating them as humans and not resources builds the connection that’s necessary to utilize their full potential. 

To make your one-on-one meetings highly effective, start with getting to know your team:

1. Inquire a little bit about their family, background and childhood.
2. Find out what catches their attention at work.
3. Ask about their hobbies and interests. Maybe you will discover a common link. 
4. What do they value the most? 
5. What puts them off—something they can’t tolerate?
6. What’s their biggest strength?
7. What are they most fearful about? 
8. In what ways they’d like to be supported?

Strive for all your one-on-one meetings to feel a little awkward. Why? Because the most important and meaningful conversations have that characteristic. It isn’t easy to discuss mistakes, confront tensions, or talk about deep fears or secret hopes, but no strong relationship can be built on superficial pleasantries alone.
— Julie Zhuo, The Making of a Manager

Asking these questions without getting too personal can give you just the information needed to communicate effectively and work better together. Knowing them can enable you to adapt the conversation instead of simply following a script. 

One-on-one meetings can’t be effective if you don’t make an attempt to know the person on the other side. Personal connections are a prerequisite to a healthy professional relationship. 

Think growth, not status update

One thing that’s always top of a manager’s mind is meeting deadlines and stakeholder expectations. This can lead to a default tendency to ask for project updates whenever they meet their team. 

Status updates are important to know how the team is progressing, what challenges they are facing and how they plan to unblock themselves. But there’s a time and place for it. One-on-one meetings are not one of them. 

One-on-one meetings should be largely focused around understanding your team’s concerns, discussing opportunities, brainstorming solutions and identifying areas of growth. 

Here are some growth oriented questions for an effective one-on-one meeting:

• What challenges did they face recently and how did they overcome them?
• What was most exciting about work?
• What bothered them the most and why?
• What kind of opportunities do they need to build new skills?
• What are their strengths? How can they put their strengths to better use?
• What conflict did they face recently and how did they handle it?

Growth oriented discussion will not only keep the conversation productive, it will also be deeply engaging for your team. They will be challenged to think, deal with their problems, work out solutions and draw valuable learning lessons thereby making them more resilient in the face of adversity and challenges. 

Do less talking, more listening 

One-on-one meetings may seem like a great opportunity to share everything on your mind—all your concerns, feedback, issues or anything else you find worth sharing. 

But in trying to complete your agenda, you may speak too much and do very little listening. Speaking makes you feel good—you pat yourself in the back for a job well done. 

But doing all the talking prevents you from listening to their expectations and concerns. You not only miss understanding how your message is received, but also leave them feeling unheard and misunderstood. 

For an effective one-on-one meeting, make them feel heard and understood first. They are more likely to listen to you when you listen to them first with the intent to understand and show respect for their views.

Practice effective listening using these practices:

1. Seek clarity and invite them to talk by asking open ended questions.
   • “Tell me more…”
   • “Help me understand …”
   • “Describe it to me …”
   • “What do you think about …”
   • “I would like to understand where you are coming from …”
   • “Can you share a little more about how you see things …?”
2. Go beyond the words to the non-verbal communication—tone of voice, hand gestures and body language.
3. Acknowledge their feelings and point of view. Acknowledging does not mean that you agree with them. It simply means that you understand how they feel.

The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting. This is the free-form meeting for all the pressing issues, brilliant ideas, and chronic frustrations that do not fit neatly into status reports, email, and other less personal and intimate mechanisms.
— Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Keep the discussion flexible and open—ask what they want to discuss instead of leading with your own agenda.  

Treating one-on-one meetings as a dialogue and not a monologue empowers your team members to take control of their own growth and learning. They feel a sense of control over the discussion which encourages them to participate with enthusiasm and a positive attitude. 

Stay present, keep distractions away 

Managers are busy creatures with hundreds of things on their mind and multiple things vying for their attention—stakeholders with unrealistic demands, deadlines fast approaching, customer escalations, an overflowing calendar and an inbox full of emails. 

This makes it hard for them to focus on one thing at a time. 

Looking at the phone or laptop while talking.

Checking watch multiple times. 

Nodding absently. 

Fidgeting. 

All these behaviors in a 1-1 meeting convey only one thing—that you aren’t interested in them and would much rather be elsewhere right now. 

Being distracted, multitasking or pretending to listen in a one-on-one meeting is not only disrespectful and rude, it instantly shuts down the conversation. 

To get your people to open up, you need to build trust—create space where they feel safe to share their ideas and concerns. This isn’t possible when you are present physically but mentally checked out. 

What often fails to be appreciated by everybody is just how significant an act of leadership it is, simply to give somebody your undivided attention for a while.
— Nick Robinson, Great One-on-One Meetings for Busy Manager

Before entering a 1-1 conversation, commit to being present—set aside all sources of distraction and pay attention to the person in front of you. 

Giving them your undivided attention shows the value you place in a one-on-one meeting, which encourages others to be committed and present too. 

Set a rhythm, don’t meet ad hoc 

One-on-one meetings are a great source to bridge the gap between your expectations and your team’s performance. It helps both the parties reach a common ground by aligning on goals, setting direction, clarifying assumptions and providing support necessary. 

Your team can’t excel without clarity on how they’re doing and what they can do to be better. Continuously striving for improvement is the key to unlock their hidden potential. 

To enable your team to strive for excellence and not settle for mediocrity, you need to have regular discussions with a pre-defined cadence. Having a schedule to meet not only makes these meetings more likely to happen, it also enables both the manager and the direct report to be better prepared for a constructive discussion. 

You can still have impromptu meetings for feedback that can’t wait, but not everything is time-sensitive and most of it can wait. 

Managers who don’t have a plan to talk to everyone on their team regularly are deluded. They believe they are going to learn what is going on in their group through some magical organizational osmosis and they won’t. Ideas will not be discovered, talent will be ignored, and the team will slowly begin to believe what they think does not matter, and the team is the company.
— Michael Lopp, Managing Humans

Depending on the size of your team, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or even a quarterly 1-1 meeting must be set. Schedule it on the calendar to increase the likelihood of it getting attended. Don’t miss these meetings at any cost unless it’s an emergency that can’t wait. 

1-1 meetings aren’t a one time phenomenon. You need to meet your team regularly. Set a rhythm so that your team looks forward to them each time. 

Summary

1. One-on-one meetings play a crucial role in setting up a team for success by aligning goals, defining expectations, providing support and helping your team realize their true potential. 
2. Taking a peek into your team’s life beyond work is important. Setting strict boundaries at work or talking work all the time prevents you from establishing a personal connection which is necessary to work together as a team. Treat your team members as humans and take interest in their life.
3. Being responsible to meet delivery timelines and commitments can make many managers talk about status all the time. But, asking for status updates in a 1-1 meeting destroys its purpose. One-on-one meetings should be focused around growth—what kind of opportunities your team needs, skills to be built, how to overcome challenges etc. 
4. When conducting a 1-1 meeting, don’t try to tick mark every item on your agenda. Leave space to hear your team’s thoughts and concerns. The more time you spend talking, the less you will listen. The less you listen, the less you will be able to identify changes that are necessary for your team’s productivity and performance.
5. Your role as a manager will keep you busier than you’d imagined. This makes you more prone to multitasking, mind wandering and many other distractions. Not giving the discussion your complete attention makes it hard for your team to trust you. Without trust, time is wasted on inconsequential topics without addressing the real issues and concerns.
6. Trying to squeeze in a 1-1 meeting randomly when your calendar allows it may appear like the best use of your time. But doing them without proper planning makes them less likely to be effective. Ad hoc meetings are also irregular and may not happen for long. Agree on a predefined frequency with your team and schedule one-on-one meetings on the calendar upfront. Your team will look forward to them as they’ll have time to prepare for a productive conversation.

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