As a leader do you engage with staff via 1-2-1s?

Employees are respected when they are heard. How you conduct meetings with your staff I think is a mark between Management and Leadership skills.

Each meeting in an organization should have focus and purpose. For example a Town Hall or All Hands meeting should be called to provide a certain platform.  To me I use those to learn about corporate strategy, where are we on the map of where we are trying to get to because typically that information is not rolled down from leaders in the organization and that drive dwindles the lower it gets.

I always had a monthly meeting with my whole organization, typically with some leader (mine or others) attend as a special guest to (a) let us know what they have going on and (b) let them learn more about us.  Then a weekly meeting with each team (for example IT Operations, IT Desktop Support, Customer / Application Support, etc) the purpose here was to get status from my sub-managers and their direct staff, what are they stuck on, where are they blocked, what successes they had so that I could unblock or celebrate where we are and also redirect where necessary.

For 1x1’s if you were new employee and a direct report they were weekly for the first 90 days. New and not a direct report every other week.  After 90 days (no longer a new employee) if you were a direct report then we went every other week. With lots of employees this can take a lot of time so I just kept a meeting schedule of Wednesdays at 9:00 week 1 is Bob week 2 is Susan, repeat. So I always had the time marked and just rotated the people through it and adjusted for vacations and outages.

The key thing for 1x1s to me is not waiting until the dreaded 1 year annual review where no one remembers details, it is about giving immediate feedback and adjustments throughout the year. In a 30 minute 1x1 I want 50% a personal discussion (family, career objectives, certification path, stressors etc) the last 50% talk about job and project related stuff.  My belief is If we are not building you or improving you, we have failed you and you should find something else. Oh and video for these is a must and unblocked background, keep it real.

My last 7 years, pre-pandemic we switched to remote working. To me it is much more important to retain contact with your employees than when in an office. In an office, just water cooler talk covers some of the above, out of sight out of mind people can get lost. Add to that a cultural shift of work/life balance and work whenever as long as your work gets done type topics makes you very disconnected in this new world.

Am I’m struggling with this a bit as I’ve transitioned from an employee to consulting. I still talk to several past employees on a regular basis or when they reach out but it isn’t the same without a staff you are accountable to.

My approach anyway.