Transform your 1:1 meetings into a source of insight

The weekly ritual is a powerful tool to help each team member grow. Tips on organising and leading the meeting.

As a team lead, you have the chance and responsibility to support your direct reports and help them progress. One-to-one meetings are a powerful tool for achieving this goal. They are the reserved moment in your week for each employee, the time where you devote all your attention to them, their work, and growth. However, they can easily become mundane and take a reporting flavour.

How do you make sure that this weekly ritual generates insights and allows you to provide valuable advice?

Let’s take this step by step.

1. Do you need to have a weekly meeting?

If you have 15 direct reports, the idea of having a weekly 1:1 with each person in your team can sound straight out crazy. My advice would be to challenge the organisation but this is not the subject of this article. You clearly cannot fit 15 1:1s in the same week, or you will become a professional 1:1 player. In this situation, try a 30-minute slot every other week and make it crystal clear that the meeting should be prepared in advance. More about this later.

If you are in the other 99% of the population, you have a reasonably sized team of 7 direct reports or less. Then yes, please take the time for a weekly 1:1 with each one of them. The goal of each check-in is to make sure you have a dedicated private time with each person. It shows you respect them, that you support them, that you are the manager who is on their side and that they can rely on.

Do your best not to move around or cancel the 1:1 check-ins. Otherwise, you send a signal of disrespect to your employees and show that you have something better to do than talk to them.

2. How long should each meeting be?

The perfect duration does not exist — adapt it to your context. I know managers who need a 1-hour slot with each direct report and would cover operational & relational topics. Others would block 15-min slots and will adapt in case of need to discuss more. And, of course, there is the golden middle — the 30-minute time slot. This is my choice as well. We have 30-minutes each week.

To make the best decision for your team, take into consideration several factors:

→ time together during the week: do you usually work together on projects or do you rarely see each other?

→ current situation: is the moment calm & productive or is it tense & challenging?

→ is your employee experienced and autonomous or rather junior who requires more support?

A technique to be flexible around the duration of your 1:1s is to block 30-minutes each week and extend it to a 1-hour slot once a month to cover higher level topics, or go back to the objectives.

3. Who should prepare the meeting?

Both of you. There is a general saying that the meeting is in the hands of the direct report — “it’s their time”.

Here is what not to do. A few years ago, I had a manager who never prepared those meetings and it was a loss of time. As he was always unprepared, he needed me to report on my week and my projects. We barely had any time to talk about current blockers, my aspirations, or ideas on how I could develop specific skills. Our 1:1s didn’t give me any value.

Once I received the advice to cancel the meeting if my direct report had not prepared. The purpose of the recommendation is to make them feel accountable.

I didn’t follow this advice. Instead, I tried to figure out why she had not prepared as it was not due to lack of understanding. It was rather mistrust in my skills to help her. She explained that she doesn’t see how I could give her advice on her work as I wasn't an expert in the field. As an expert, she focused her attention on the technical side of the job but was lagging behind on collaboration or communication skills. We focused the discussion on soft skills and collaboration blockers which helped her see where I could help her and how to prepare the meetings for the next sessions.

To make sure the meeting is prepared on both sides:

→ Clarify that each one of you is responsible to prepare well for the weekly ritual.→ Prepare a template (some examples below) and precise who should fill which part.→ If you observe any praise or area of improvement you want to mention, it’s the perfect time to raise them!

4. 1:1 templates

Structuring your 1:1 meetings will help you focus on what is important and make the experience productive for both sides.

You can build the template on your own, or choose from the pre-made templates you will find online for different tools. I had built some (free) templates for Notion which offers a slightly different structure for the variety of characters you may have on your team.

Effective 1:1s -> Notion templates

If you prefer using another tool or a document, here are some golden rules:

→ put the template on a shared area ONLY with your employee (don’t keep it in a public place);

→ have a dedicated space for each week: it could be a new page, document, or a row on a sheet;

→ pre-fill in advance the template and keep it visible to your employee (they should do the same);

→ add an area for highlights, current blockers, and open topics;

→ add an entertaining way to ask them to recap their week, for example with three “emojis” or a .gif image;

→ store all weekly 1:1s in the same place if you want to go back to a specific period or topic.

Every few months, ask your team member if they want to change anything in the format or content of the meeting. If you feel the structure makes the conversation too strict or uninteresting, propose changes to the current format.

5. Taking a step back

1:1 meetings are a fantastic tool to get to know your employees, gain valuable insight into their performance, and provide advice on how they can improve. Encourage your employees to speak, focus on the right subject, use a structured template, and build trust with your employees.

With the right approach, you can transform your 1:1 meetings into a source of insight that will help you and your team reach a level of performance you haven’t even dreamt about.