I’m obsessed with 1:1s
This post is a summary of my in-depth podcast episode, Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Meetings - and how to fix them.
I just finished a month of Monday posts about great 1:1 questions to ask your team. I picked this topic because 1:1s have such a huge impact on team members and their mental health, for better or for worse.
Unfortunately, it’s often worse. And that’s just crazy to me. Great 1:1s aren't hard to do. There are tons of great articles with ideas for questions and meeting structure, and people like me posting about it. It’s almost like you have to be arrogant or wilfully ignorant about the importance of 1:1 meetings and their outsized impact on your team.
1:1s should be a sacred time for your employees’ career development. But instead, what I see very often is a manager viewing the 1:1 as being of service to them instead of their employee. These managers are the ones who approach the 1:1 as if the employee is a captive - and I do mean captive - audience for whatever abuse and confusion they’re about to unleash on you.
I had a boss who approached our 1:1s as a brainstorming session for him. He was insecure about his own toxic boss and so he would see our meeting as this opportunity to make me sit through his anxiety with him and hear him rattle off ideas and insecurities in rapid fire. So I would just be sitting there, having to ask questions about priority and resourcing and trying to clarify if he was assigning me something or just listening to himself talk. And that would frustrate him, too. He didn’t like being held accountable or having to add any clarity.
Worse, he was usually late and then would run over. And I don’t mean like 5 or 10 minutes. I mean like 30 or 40 minutes over, often long past working hours until it was dark outside. And I was not the only one subjected to this. He did this with the whole team, and we all ended up with a kind of PTSD about these meetings. Never in those meetings did he never once ask how I was doing, if I needed any help, or what my career goals were. I only stayed there for 6 months or so.
Another common mis-use of the 1:1 is when bosses see it as a place to dump new assignments, like 5 -10 new things they’ve just now thought of for you to take care of for them. And they don’t give you the courtesy of contextualizing or prioritizing. Again, like my anxious boss, they leave the clarifications to you.
If this is you and you’re wondering how to assign new projects instead of rattling them off in 1:1s, the answer is to have a dedicated resourcing meeting or resourcing chat where all assignments are considered, qualified, and prioritized. And then, they are carefully handed off with timelines.
