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Checklist for leading one on one meetings

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This is the second in a series for people who want to use one-on-one meetings as a great tool for leading the efforts of their team members

A structured but flexible one-to-one meetings approach is probably the best way you’ll find for managing and motivating the work of your individual team members. But sometimes it isn’t easy to know how to go about doing that effectively, or to make sure that it will get the results you’d want – such as switched-on and fulfilled team members and tasks that get done well and on time.

If you right-click the image above and then select “Save as…” you can download your own copy of the checklist.

Life as a manager can often be very busy and quite complicated, so if that’s the case for you – use this checklist as a way of getting started, in this order:

  1. Take stock of which items on the checklist you already have in place or already know the answers to?
  2. Once you’ve done that, which is the most straightforward item on the checklist for you to work on next?

If you need more information, you can read the rest of the tips when published here. They’re essentially a summary of my short ebooklet.

Or go ahead and grab your copy from Amazon here – free to Kindle Unlimited members or otherwise £1.99

I wrote that short ebooklet when, in the space of a fortnight, three separate coaching clients mentioned that they were struggling a little with running their one-to-one meetings with their individual team members. It’s easy to cover those kinds of issues in a coaching session, but it seemed to me that it would make better use of my clients’ time in our sessions if I could also just give them some simple guidance to take away and use as and when they wanted. I hope that the booklet has been useful – it’s been slowly working its way up the independent management books charts anyway. The next in the series will cover Delegation.

What’s essential for you, when running your own one-on-one sessions with your team members? Either leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or tweet me @nickrobcoach.

Download a free copy of this useful checklist for running great one-on-one meetings with your team members. No sign-ups etc required #leadership #management. Click To Tweet

 

 

 

How to get your mindset right for leading one on one meetings

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This is the first in a series for people who want to use one-on-one meetings as a good tool for leading the efforts of their team members

It’s based on my short ebooklet available from Amazon here – free to Kindle Unlimited members or otherwise £1.99

You can read the rest of the tips when published here. They’re essentially a summary of the booklet.

By way of introduction, I wrote that short ebooklet when, in the space of a fortnight, three separate coaching clients mentioned that they were struggling a little with running their one-to-one meetings with their individual team members. It’s easy to cover those kinds of issues in a coaching session, but it seemed to me that it would make better use of my clients’ time in our sessions if I could also just give them some simple guidance to take away and use as and when they wanted. I hope that the booklet has been useful – it’s been slowly working its way up the independent management books charts anyway. The next in the series will cover Delegation.

All great management starts with the manager’s own mindset. To make a good management process work well, it isn’t enough to know what to do and how to do it, you also need to know what attitudes of mind are likely to get the best results for you. Here are the most important ones for running great one-on-one meetings:

  1. Empowerment as an outcome of your management – you’ve got to want to inspire people to get more done under their own motivation and responsibility.

It’s a bit like having teenagers, they need to learn how to do stuff for themselves. Until you’re prepared to adopt this as part of your mindset, you’re likely to be spoon-feeding people and picking-up after them long after they could have learned to do it for themselves. I think the trick here is to actually include empowerment as one of the outcomes you’re after. Put it up there alongside the tasks that you want this person to achieve and give it as much, if not more, weight as all the other important stuff you need to ensure gets done.

  1. Coaching as a leadership style – where you put a big chunk of your leadership energies into the longer-term development of others.

It’s not the only leadership style you’ll need to use, but it is very effective and very rewarding for you. It’s also a good partner to empowerment. You could think of a coaching leadership style as being NOT about you as leader having the answers, but about guiding people to find their own answers to things.

If I had to encapsulate it in a single phrase for leaders to use, it’d be something like:
“How about trying this…?”

  1. The transition from doing to leading – the more your responsibilities increase, the more you need to shift from actually doing stuff yourself, to getting stuff done by acting through others – by leading.

If you’re like most people, you’ll have got to your position at least partly because you’re good at what you do. And so this can sometimes be a tricky transition to make, or even to be aware of its significance. It’s also quite scary because of course it takes you outside of what you know you’re good at doing, into possibly new territory – and people are often much more complex to understand and influence than the tasks themselves.

But this is a really important place to get your head into. Take a deep breath, stop doing stuff yourself, and start making sure that you act through others.

Let me know what kind of mindset works well for you, when running your own one-on-one sessions with your team members please? Either leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or tweet me @nickrobcoach.

To make a good management process work well, it isn’t enough to know what to do and how to do it, you also need to know what attitudes of mind are likely to get the best results for you. Click To Tweet

 

 

 

Zooming, Storming, Norming and Performing – Teams and Video Conferencing

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How Video-conferencing is impacting the way that teams perform and making us miss crucial problems

It’s said that teams and groups follow four (or sometimes five) stages of development as they learn how to work together:

  1. A ‘Forming’ stage – where people don’t quite know how the team behaves together, what’s expected of them and what’s acceptable (or not). During this stage, people test the water, trying to find out how they should behave with each other;
  2. A ‘Storming’ stage – where people begin to resist or act against the constraints that team membership places on them. During this stage, you can expect conflicts to arise and for people to compete for informal leadership and their place in the hierarchy;
  3. A ‘Norming’ stage – where people develop close relationships and the team coheres around a shared identity. During this stage, the ideas around what constitutes acceptable behaviour become fixed;
  4. A ‘Performing’ stage – where people basically can now turn their energy away from issues around team formation and behavioural norms and start getting stuff done.
  5. (For those teams – like project groups and task-forces that are temporary in nature, there’s a fifth stage – Adjourning, where performance drops again as everybody prepares to disband).

Evidence for whether or not teams do actually follow this four-stage model for performance is mixed, but it is a useful thought-starter for what to do at times when performance is low, or when leaders are wondering about changing team memberships.

I’ve noticed in my coaching with teams how the impact of Zoom video conferencing is felt at each stage:

At the Forming stage, the impact of Zoom is most felt in that people are now also having to test out video-conferencing related behaviours, rather than purely work-related behaviours. (Have a google for “what to wear when video conferencing” to see what I mean. In case it helps, Vogue suggested recently that dressing professionally raises our opinion of ourselves, so I’ve put my work shoes on to write this). Leaders will want to make sure that their video conferencing etiquette includes a rounded assessment of the behaviours that will make the team (and the meeting ) effective, as well as the usual “what background are you using?” stuff.

Perhaps the biggest thing I’ve noticed is a tendency for Zooming to hide the ‘Storming’ part of team of team formation. It seems all too easy for work conflicts to not be addressed in a Zoom meeting. Even if it’s uncomfortable, leaders need to turn the spotlight onto individuals occasionally. Ask about what barriers there are to effective working together. Ask directly where different priorities and agendas are conflicting. Challenge people – “Why aren’t you two resolving this together?” And most importantly, don’t let people use technical glitches, diary clashes and the lack of immediate body-language feedback to hide away from or duck any unresolved ‘Storming’. It will happen sometime; best to manage it when you get a chance.

Another important thing to look for, particularly at the ‘Norming’ and ‘Performing’ stages is the kind of group-think that means people will overlook or just not see obvious problems (for example in customer service or in the overall performance of the division or in how individuals are coping). There’s something about the strangeness of not seeing each other face-to-face that means we might also be blindly accepting all kinds of other strangeness or out of-the-ordinary problems without noticing them or feeling the urgency to address them. Leaders should ask themselves and their teams: “Whilst it’s all so weird, what are we not noticing, that needs our attention?”

Let me know if you’ve noticed any of this too please – or what you’re finding out about teamwork now that we’re not meeting face-to-face?

Please leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or tweet me @nickrobcoach

Zooming, Storming, Norming and Performing: How is video conferencing impacting your team-effectiveness? Click To Tweet

A Leaders’ Guide to One-to-One Meetings

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Ten ways to use one-to-one meetings to block progress, disempower people and avoid an embarrassing sense of being a team

 

Click on the picture above to download your own copy.

 

Oh, and I forgot number 11:

Always write it as “1-2-1” and never “one-to-one”. Because (a) words are just so hard to type and read, and (b) it’s so much quicker to use numbers and other shorthand than to muck about referring to actual people.