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I know this won't surprise Mark or Mike. It actually didn't surprise me either. I want to share one of my recent successes with One-on-Ones.
Without going into a lot of detail about my unique situation, in April I became a project lead in a matrix organization which has no history of One-on-Ones and really no concept of a Manager Tools One-on-One. There are two people who work on my team part time.
I immediately started PM One-on-Ones with them. One of them pushed back and I've been working with the push back advice from the PM One-on-One episode and from these forums. (Thanks for all the help. Things are getting better.) The other individual has been open to them and we've been conducting weekly O3s from the beginning.
Yesterday was my meeting with him. He came to my cubicle and we started. He started right in talking about his work schedule and he shared some additional information about his family which is having an influence when he'll be working on our project. Then he started going through his status updates. He had brought with him a list of topics he wanted to cover from things he had accomplished to questions about some of the tasks I had assigned to him. One by one we talked about each of his concerns.
When it was my time I looked at the list of questions that I had prepared on my O3 Tracking Form in the 5 minutes before the meeting. Four out of the five items I wanted to talk about were already covered during his time.
This is exactly the sort of results that Mark and Mike have talked about in the different O3 episodes and at the Effective Manager Conference. It was great to actually experience them. It may have taken six months to get to this point, and it was well worth it.
If you're just starting out with One-on-Ones and your work culture doesn't have anything like them, don't get discouraged if you've been going for 4-6 weeks and you haven't noticed some kind of revolution in the environment. Your time is coming. Stick to them. Hold yourself accountable for making them a priority for your team. For me it totally worked.
Jack
Colorado
More O3 Success
So today was my "Status Update Meeting" with the other member of the team. It was how I finally got a half hour on both of our calendars where he comes to my cubicle and we can talk about the work he is doing.
While we didn't have as much personal discussion, he came with updates on what he has completed and a few issues as he sees them. The personal conversation is just who he is, different from the other individual.
When we got done talking about the items in his list, I looked at my list and we had covered everything.
Given the rocky start we had and the stages we went through to get to this point, I was happy to see that we've gotten to this point. That means that in addition to sticking things out to see results from One-on-Ones, don't give up when you get some initial resistance to a change in process. This applies even if O3s are fairly far from the company norms. Just because everyone else is working ineffectively doesn't mean you have to.
Jack
Colorado