One-to-ones
Every fortnight, line managers should have a 20 minute informal one-to-one meeting with their team members. You may also have more one-to-ones with others in the company at less regular intervals.
Founder Office Hours
Even if Chris and Mike aren't your direct line managers, you're still more than welcome to book in time to chat with them. Find out more here: Founder Office Hours
Running effective one-to-ones
The key to a good 1:1 meeting is understanding that it's the team member’s meeting, rather than the manager's. This is a time to talk about pressing issues, ideas and/or frustrations on a more personal level, rather than via email or Slack e.g. how do you get help when you love your job, but your personal life is melting down? Or vice versa?
In the 1:1, managers should do 10% of the talking and 90% of the listening. A key quality of a good manager is being able to draw the key issues out of your team member - comfortably and honestly.
How to prepare
To ensure an effective 1:1, we strongly recommended that team members think about 2-3 things to discuss, ahead of time. These 2-3 things should not be status updates on things they’re working on - but wider issues or concerns people might be facing.
For team members: A quick unlock for this is to spend 10 minutes going through your calendar beforehand and list 1-2 challenges that have come up in the past few weeks - which avoids focusing on whatever's top of mind at the time.
Conversations starters
Sometimes, it can be tricky to know what to ask, or it might feel like there’s not much to talk about. This isn’t the case! The following example questions are useful to think about, and can help managers guide conversation to ensure an effective 1:1 meeting.
Day to day
These questions should help to probe deeper and allow managers and team members to identify a problem, understand the necessary actions, and provide support. You might find the identify section useful as an alternative way to spark conversation in frequent 1:1 sessions, rather than starting with "how are things?" to which people often just respond "yeah, good". On that note, "How are you today?", is a better question than "How are you?".
🕵🏻♀️ Identify
What's top of mind for you right now?
What priorities are you thinking about this week?
What's the best use of our time today?
🙋🏽♀️ Understand
What does your ideal outcome look like?
What's hard for you in getting to the outcome?
What do you really care about?
What do you think is the best course of action?
What's the worst case scenario you're worried about?
Support
How can I help you?
What can I do to make you more successful?
What was the most useful part of our conversation today?
Questions to support wellbeing and long-term development
🌟 Personal Wellbeing
What can we/I do to make your life easier?
Has anything difficult happened recently or are you struggling with anything at the moment?
What is just becoming clear to you now?
What do you feel great about right now?
Career & Development
Career & DevelopmentWhat skills would you like to develop?
Is there a recent situation you wish you had handled differently? What would you change?
What support could be provided to enable you to grow in your role?
What are your goals for the upcoming month?
🌱 Second Nature
What area of the company would you like to learn more about?
If we could improve in any way, how would we do it?
What’s the biggest problem at Second Nature? Why?
How do you feel about x? (where x could be our product, our meeting structure, our 1-1s etc)
👐 Manager Relationship
Is there anything I can help you with?
What do I do that frustrates you?
If you were in my position, what would you do differently?