Episode #68: How to Maximize the Impact of One-on-One Meetings with Your Employees

What can a people manager like you do to reap the benefits of one-of-one meetings with your employees?
The short answer is to focus on “what’s in it” for your employees. How do you do that? 
Listen to this episode for three tips to significantly improve the engagement, trust, performance management, and overall business impact of each of your employees through well run one-on-one meetings.

Transcript

Welcome to THE CAREER ACCELERATOR, the podcast where corporate managers will find tips and tools to deliver results through others.

Hello. Today I will share three suggestions to maximize the impact of your one-on-one meetings with your employees. 

I’m your host, Percy Cannon.

In our last episode I invited you to consider applying Patrick’s Lencioni Organizational Health model, outlined in his book The Advantage. 

If you want to improve your organization’s productivity and the morale of your employees, minimize politics and confusion, and lower the attrition of good people, consider applying Lencioni’s four-step model:

1.   Align the behaviors of your team,

2.   Align the intellectual clarity of your team by answering six critical questions,

3.   Over-communicate this clarity to the rest of the organization, and

4.   Reinforce this clarity through simple human and business systems.

I invited you to take advantage of a simple yet very effective (and free) 16-question assessment of your Organizational Health, developed by Patrick Lencioni’s company, The Table Group, to determine where your team has the biggest opportunity for growth. Contact me to set it up.

Today, I want to entice you to focus on improving one-on-one meetings with your employees.

As a people manager, running effective one-on-ones can dramatically increase the engagement, trust, performance management, and overall business impact of each of your employees.

Throughout my participation in the corporate world over the last four decades, first inside as an executive and now as coach, I have consistently found a sub-par approach to running manager-employee one-on-one meetings.

Some of the problems I continue to see are:

·        A lack of consistency in the scheduling of these one-on-ones and in ensuring they happen at the scheduled date and time.

·        Poor preparation by the manager and the employee. 

·        A one-way exchange of information, with managers dominating the agenda and asking for the status of activities and projects assigned to the employee. 

·        Very little to no time and energy allocated to covering topics that matter to the employee, such as development, constructive feedback, and career plan.  

What can a people manager like you do to reap the benefits of one-of-ones? The short answer is to focus on “WHAT'S IN IT” for your employee. How do you do that?

1.   Start by asking each employee what their top three expectations are from you as their manager. In one of my early podcast episodes, I shared a challenging situation that I, and my direct reports, all of whom were managers, faced in one of my latest corporate jobs. In the annual internal organizational survey, our employees gave us low scores in our people manager role. 
Needless to say, we went into panic mode. We were failing in one of our most important roles.
After much deliberation, one of our leadership team members suggested applying the same principle to our employees that we did with our key clients: What do they expect from us? Is it help with issue resolution? Support investment proposals? Robust development plans? Next career steps? 
We agreed to test this approach with me, as their manager, in our next round of one-on-ones.
After some fine-tuning, we rolled it out to our employees.
The following year’s organizational survey showed, as you can probably anticipate, a significant improvement in our ratings as managers.

2.   Practice servant leadership with your employees. Once we found out what their top three expectations were, it was key to finish the meetings with a summary of the activities that the manager was committing to work on between one-on-ones.
In the following meeting, we had to come prepared to inform the employee of our progress on the previous meeting’s commitments. In other words, we made ourselves accountable. 

This was pure servant leadership put into practice.

3.   Use every one-on-one as an opportunity to provide feedback to the employee. Start by asking them what you are doing well and where you can improve as their manager. Then highlight their recent contributions to the business and the organization. Make sure to be clear and constructive in where they need to improve.
A good practice I learned from one of my recent clients was to summarize, in writing, the key feedback provided to the employee in each of these meetings. When the time came for the formal performance reviews, they fed these summaries into Chat GPT and used the output as an initial draft for the final version they prepared for the employee’s formal assessment. Would this also work for you?

In summary, well-run one-on-ones can significantly improve the engagement, trust, performance management, and overall business impact of each of your employees. Start by finding out “WHAT’S IN IT” for each of your employees. Leverage your one-on-ones to practice servant leadership. Listen more and talk less. Ask and provide feedback as often as possible.     

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. In the next one, I will continue to provide content that can help you become a more effective leader and a better team player. 

If you like what you heard today, let me ask you to please rate, subscribe, or follow this podcast and share it with your coworkers and friends. Also, you can request a free coaching call with me by using the links provided on this platform.

This is Percy Cannon, working to help you make the rest of your life…the best of your life®.