One on Ones – Work or Personal?
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This guidance addresses how personal One on Ones ought to be – should they be all about family and personal stuff, or just about work?
One of our regrets in producing casts over the years was an emphasis we made about getting to know your directs personally during One on Ones. We over-emphasized the importance of personal information, to the extent that some managers we’ve heard from feel that they are failing unless they know every detail about all of their directs. This guidance is designed to tighten our guidance about the balance between work and personal topics discussed during One on Ones.
What happened was that when we started our casts, in 2005, we were in the process of consulting to some very technical organizations. The managers at several clients knew literally nothing about their directs, and professed no interest in ever caring. So, we were pretty insistent with many of them that they had to get to know them in order to get the best from them. That led to our guidance being skewed based on the client world we were inhabiting at the time. We didn’t even realize it until we heard horror stories of managers insisting directs share really personal stuff – and we’ll leave it at that.
This guidance will help clear up how best to conduct your One on Ones around the work/family balance.
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- Fitch
- yellowfir
- GlennR
- GlennR
- RDHodgson
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- lionel
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Thank you for another great podcast!
I love your podcast and I am looking forward to more podcasts on 1 on 1s.
I do have a question, though: am I at risk of becoming a bad manager since I can not manage to have weekly 1 on 1s with my direct reports and can't afford to listen to all the stories they want to share during these meetings? I do have 30 direct reports, out of which 3 leads. 20 of my direct reports are off-shore, in a time zone with 12 hours difference. I start my 1 on 1s with them at 4 am my time and I run the meeting for 1 hour. They do send me status reports weekly, we talk about work and family, etc. They do support all the efforts and produce results. They do go the extra mile when needed. They are great people and each one is different and unique in his/her way. Some of them are just talking about personal life a lot once we are done with all the project related work. I always let them talk, I do not want to interrupt. I make it clear from the first minute of the 1 on 1 that we have exactly 1 hour for this meeting, but some people keep talking and forgetting about this. Is there a way to interrupt the meeting in such a way that none of them feel bad about it? I really do not want to say "I hate to interrupt, but I have another meeting I need to go to. I am really interested in hearing more about this, we can talk later." since I know that we really do not have the time for another meeting over the phone to continue the conversation.
Note: with the people on site I have bi-weekly 1 on 1s and with the leads I have weekly 1 on 1s.
Thank you very much for your help with this!
MS
DISC model effect
About the previous post -- my O3 model is 30 minutes and follows the MT model to the tee. That usually means the last part of the meeting is more or less under my control so I can end it at any time. I always end the same way (borrowing from Mike A's begin the same way tactic) - "Is there anything you need me to do?" And they tacitly understand this is the final remark.
From my personal experience, my high D types will skip straight to work in their 10 minutes of the O3 and rattle off the list of things they want to brief me on or they need to report to me on.
People with more of an S (I haven't really had any strong I directs) component will ask me about my weekend and segway into their weekend activities or talk about something outside of work.