#158: Effective one-on-one meetings
“…leading teams becomes a lot more joyful when you know and care about people. It’s freeing.”
The Trillion Dollar Coach
The Trillion Dollar Coach
Good morning friends
In the course of my coaching work, I am often asked, “How do I have more effective one-on-one meetings?” Quite often, that quickly becomes a more tactical question – should we be using OKRs, KPAs and KPIs, or some other matrix-driven structure to ensure consistency? At that point, I slow the conversation to first make explicit the best practices that should inform the engagement. That is where we’re going today…
/ strategy
Great one-on-one meetings are actually about coaching. I like famed NFL player and coach, Tom Landry’s definition:
“A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.”
You can only get that right if you’ve built trust.
Bill Campbell, former CEO of Intuit and coach to Google’s Eric Schmidt and Apple’s Steve Jobs, was insistent that powerful one-on-ones are built on a foundation of strong relationships saying, “To care about people you have to care about people.”
His colleagues at Google wrote The Trillion Dollar Coach – the total value of the businesses he advised – as a celebration of his leadership style.
Campbell ensured that before he moved to the work, he checked in on the person. The relationship enabled the work.
We all say that we care about people, and we do. Yet, in the pace of organisational life, we easily forget that connecting requires intention and attention. We focus on the to-dos and forget the person. Often.
Of course, there are times when we need to focus on task-at-hand, but we must always remember that it is strong relationships that are the strategic priority.
There are many pragmatic reasons to want that strong relationship and I also like this slightly fuzzier sentiment expressed in The Trillion Dollar Coach, “It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the work of what we’re producing, and not how we’re doing it. But leading teams becomes a lot more joyful when you know and care about people. It’s freeing.”
Leadership is tough, so making it joyful feels like a great start. Feeling free is a great enabler for innovation.
Still, you might want more…
Having a strong relationship is a precursor to psychological safety, which enables trust, and you want trust because you can’t possibly know everything that is happening in your business or division, so you want your team to feel safe enough to bring you issues before they become catastrophic problems. You want people to feel safe, because it is only then that sustained creativity happens and you can only safeguard your business if you’re evolving.
Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar, notes in Creativity Inc, “Complex environments are, by definition, too complicated for any one person to grasp fully. Yet many managers, afraid of appearing to not be in control, believe that they have to know everything – or at least act like they do”.
Catmull goes further, observing that it is inevitable, particularly if we’ve been in a business for a long time, to assume we know everything even though it is impossible to do so.
Knowing those two contradictory facts – no one person can know a complex environment in its entirety, and nevertheless, we default to thinking that we can – makes relationship-based one-on-ones even more critical.
Solely task-based one-on-ones send the message ‘I know everything that is going on in this business’ and so you inadvertently reduce your access to information. Relationship-based one-on-ones create the space for sharing different views on the organisation.
Harvard Business School psychologist Amy Edmondson, in her book reviewing governance failures that costs hundreds of millions, notes that “making the environment safe for open communication about challenges, concerns, and opportunities is one of the most important leadership responsibilities in the twenty-first century”.
She cautions us that “silence is instinctive and safe; it offers self-protection benefits, and these are both immediate and certain” and “No one is fired for silence. The instinct to play it safe is powerful”.
Ensuring that your one-on-one meetings first and foremost build relationship makes your job more joyful; helps you build a more complete picture; gives you access to insight that you don’t have and builds resilience for the times when things get tough.
Let’s get into the detail.
First, frequency.
Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall tell us “… checking in with your team members once a month is literally worse than useless. While team leaders who check in once a week see, on average, a 13 percent increase in team engagement, those who check in only once a month see a 5 percent decrease in engagement.”
It doesn’t need to be an hour-long marathon session; short and focused – even fifteen minutes every few days – can be powerful.
I recommend though that you do keep some space for more expansive conversations, not every week but it does need to be there. Some topics take time.
Then, what about the actual content?
Well, I’ve said ‘relationship’, like it’s obvious how to do that. If, like me, you’re a task-focused someone, it takes practice.
My hack is to use always use three questions.
For example, “How are you?” “What did you do over the weekend?” “Which event did you enjoy the most?” The third question takes you into the detail. Once you’re in the detail, the detail is like Velcro it hooks you in and you’re away.
Then, on the work part of your relationship…
Buckingham tells us to give positive attention to the things that are going well. Positive attention is thirty times more effective than focusing on failures. This doesn’t mean ignoring failure, it just means high performance comes from focusing on where you’ve got momentum.
Fixing failures? Well, that, by definition, means you’re not failing. If you want high performance focus on what is going well, understand it and amplify it…
Buckingham and Goodall have a broad approach, they suggest we focus on “What are your priorities this week?” and “How can I help?”
Campbell’s approach was more specific. He had four focal areas; Performance requirements (eg: sales figures), relationships with peer groups across the organisation, management and leadership of your team, and how you’re innovating.
You’re unlikely to cover all these in a fifteen-minute check-in, so be clear about where you’re focusing.
The Trillion Dollar Coach’s authors note “Bill’s perspective was that it’s a manager’s job to push the team to be more courageous. Courage is hard. People are naturally afraid of taking risks for fear of failure. It’s the manager’s job to push them past their reticence.”
Catmull says at Pixar “We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways…we try to identify those impediments and fix them”.
And Edmondson reminds us “Leaders who welcome only good news create fear that blocks them from hearing the truth” and “Early information about shortcomings can nearly always mitigate the size and impact of future, large-scale failure”.
Effective one-on-ones give your team the opportunity to feel safe enough to have the courage to address and fix impediments.
The last comment on the structure of one-on-ones comes from Julie Zhuo’s The Making of A Manager – “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”.
To have awkward conversations, you need to have strong relationships.
To conclude, make your one-on-one meetings an opportunity to listen, coach and learn.
Campbell described it as “see(ing) little flaws in the organization that with a little massage we can make better. I listen, observe, and fill the communication and understanding gaps between people.”
You can do the same.
All the best
Karl
PS: // some personal soul and self
Since 20 April, I have been quietly celebrating my 50th birthday. I had wanted to share that news earlier, but it didn’t fit the focus of the previous two letters.
Even today I ran out of space above, so I tucked this here as a PS. My logic was you get your Sunday content and then you can dip into this if you want to…of course, I am conscious of the irony that I have put the ‘task’ of effective one-on-ones ahead of the relationship, but hey we’re all works in progress…😊
I contemplated the big bash approach, decided that wasn’t for me, and instead settled on a series of smaller celebrations; call it a tapas birthday.
The sneaky joy in this is that I can claim everything for the next 11 months as being part of my ongoing celebration.
I woke early on my birthday and worked for a few hours. There were some thoughts that I wanted to share with my clients. I felt blessed that I didn’t feel I needed to cancel ‘work’, but rather that my work is that close to my heart that it is exactly what I wanted to do that Thursday morning. It too was a celebration.
Those who know me, know that my best gifts are eaten, drunk or read and so the rest of the day was spent paging lazily through piles of books and imagining what I might cook to accompany what wine. I was being me and enjoying that I could enjoy it.
On the weekend of my birthday, a friend left us with the keys to his home and the instruction to drink wine.
The house, at the end of a narrow country road whose entrance is easily missed and whose end is close to nowhere, is tucked in the folds of a Stellenbosch valley, surrounded by mountains and vineyards. It is a soulful place.
I spent forty minutes scouring his collection to find wines I could drink without blushing. I failed and so the weekend was spent in the company of Rust en Vrede’s Estate Blend and Kanonkop’s Paul Sauer (if wine is your thing, you might enjoy reading this).
Roxanne arranged a surprise visit from friends who arrived bearing more wine, mutton and dahl curry, and a dark chocolate and red wine cake (specially made as a non-cake-cake for me who isn’t the world’s most desserty person).
Tobias Wolff once said of acclaimed author George Saunders, “He’s such a generous spirit you’d be embarrassed to behave in a small way around him”. I am blessed to be surrounded by people from that tribe.
We spent last weekend at Halfaampieskraal (I will tell you more about it in the next few weeks) and this week’s letter comes to you from Kigali, where I am in the company of fellows of the African Leadership Initiative. The tapas thing is working out…
Thank you for all the wonderful messages that I have received over the last two weeks. I have felt seen, valued, and appreciated.
PPS: You can read more about today’s authors by clicking on each of these links – Edmondson, Zhuo, Campbell, Buckingham, and Catmull.