I started officially managing a team (6 people) a little more than 2.5 months ago. One thing of prime importance to me is having one-on-one meetings with my team members. When I officially took over the position as manager, I had one-on-one meetings every week with every member of my team for three weeks. Here is the summary of the goals for these initial three one-on-one meetings:
- Understand my teammates better: Understand their motivations, life journey, and their journey at the company.
- Ask them to envision a possible great future for themselves: What are a few different futures that they can envision for themselves at the peak of their careers and lives?
- Based on the discussions in the previous two meetings, come up with a short-term (next 3 months), medium-term (6–12 months), and long-term (beyond 1 year) plan for them.
I will cover the details of these three meetings in another post, but for now, let’s move on to the template that I use for my one-on-one meetings.
First of all, it is very important to keep notes of your 1-on-1 meetings. It’s not only useful for both of you to refer back to but also useful when an employee changes managers. Otherwise, all this history will be lost for the most part.
