Don’t Forget These Topics in Your 1:1s as a Manager
Because your direct reports are not Jira tickets.
It’s fairly well known that a bad manager is the №1 reason people leave their job. There are a lot of ways to be a bad manager, but there’s one golden rule I tend to stick by: “people won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
When managing at a fast-paced company, it’s really easy to get stuck covering what’s currently being worked on and other tactical topics. While those are certainly important to cover, they miss out on the “how much does my manager care about me” component.
Once a month, I like to review the following ideas with each employee to make sure their personal needs from the job are covered as well:
- Career Goals: which division, track, and position does this teammate ultimately want to end up in? Does the person want to be at the highest rung of individual contributors, or move into people management?
- Happiness: Do they feel Challenged & Motivated & Sense of Autonomy + Purpose — according to http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation
- Mentors: Do they have a professional mentor within the company, and outside the company? Are they meeting them regularly?
- Mentoring: If they are mid-career or later, are they giving back by mentoring professionally, inside the company, and outside the company?
- Learning: Are they participating in continuing professional education or side projects, particularly oriented towards hitting their career goals?
- Books: Are they reading/listening to books for continuing professional education?
- Bi-Directional Baseball Cards: Ensure that your teammates know what their performance is being judged against, and how they are currently doing. Particularly skill gaps, as everyone has them. Ensure you know what your reportees desire from you, and how well you’re delivering it. Modeled after Ray Dalio’s baseball cards: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/06/ray-dalios-baseball-card-collection.html
I hope you find these useful to cover as well, and please respond back if you do anything similarly / differently!