The Managers Guide to Leading with One to One …...2017/01/03 · This short booklet is for busy managers who would like to use a one-to-one meetings approach to help their team

Copyright © 2016 by Nick Robinson

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For permission requests and other information, please contact me at: www.nickrobinson.org

Contents

Introduction..........................................................................................................1WheretoStart.......................................................................................................2WhenthisApproachisUseful................................................................................2StepOne–YourMind-set......................................................................................3StepTwo–YourOwnPortfolioofWork................................................................4StepThree–DealingwithResistance....................................................................5StepFour–ClarifyingReportingLines....................................................................6StepFive–Preparation..........................................................................................7StepSix–PastoralCareChecklist...........................................................................9StepSeven–CreatingRapport............................................................................10StepEight–TheCoachingQuestions...................................................................12StepNine–Reviewing.........................................................................................14StepTen–ClosingtheMeeting............................................................................14Checklist..............................................................................................................15AboutNickRobinson...........................................................................................16AnnexA:TheScienceBehindThoseCoachingQuestions.....................................17

…Leading with One-to-One Meetings

© Nick Robinson 2016 1

Introduction This short booklet is for busy managers who would like to use a one-to-one meetings approach to help their team members to be more productive and feel more fulfilled.

The basic approach is simple – to use a regular, structured and flexible one-to-one meetings process with each of your team members as your main tool for leading their work efforts.

Using this process, you can inspire people to do more under their own motivation and help them to feel more satisfied about it, but without them making expensive mistakes or tackling the wrong priorities.

The writing of this booklet was helped by the insights and experiences of my coaching clients. They’re generally can-do people with a wide range of responsibilities. They’re often managing lots of activities and several team members with different levels of experience and motivation, in busy and demanding settings. Some team members are experts and need to be managed as such, whilst others may need more guidance, and some are working on new, challenging or critical tasks.

Whether you’re already using a one-to-one meetings approach like this but would like to make more of it, or are new to the method please read on.

If you’d like a simple, adaptable yet systematic approach so that you can manage your team in a way that’s empowering for them and dependable for you – this booklet might just help.

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The Manager’s Guide to…

2 © Nick Robinson 2016

Where to Start If you want to, you can easily read through the whole of this booklet in around half an hour. The concepts are pretty straightforward and practical and there’s a step-by-step process that you can either follow as it is, or just select the bits that you might find most useful. In order to get the most from it, reading everything about how this process works will help enormously with the management of your team.

On the other hand, if you’re really keen to dive in and get your one-to-one meetings underway, you could turn straight to the Coaching Questions section. These questions are designed to be used as a kind of script for your one-to-one meetings. Use these roughly as they are and roughly in the order shown and they’ll help you to manage the priority tasks that your team members are working on, in a way that is empowering for them and dependable for you.

When this Approach is Useful Here are the typical situations when people I’ve coached with have found this one-to-one meetings approach really useful:

1. You’re the leader of more than one or two people (who may also be team-leaders themselves)

2. You want to help those people to make the most of themselves and to manage their workloads as effectively as possible

3. There are significant demands on your own time and your people are already fairly busy themselves

4. You’re juggling so much yourself that you may have already sensed it’s time to try a different approach

5. One or more of the people you lead are responsible for areas which need relatively high levels of technical expertise, skills or abilities and you know that it’s better for you to not get stuck too far into trouble-shooting at that level.



Step One – Your Mind-set 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. You’ll know this already from your own experience. For example, if somebody is bored and disinterested, it doesn’t matter how good they are, that mind-set will show in their work. How somebody thinks really does affect how they do things.

Here are some of the key attitudes of mind that have enabled managers to get the most out of the one-to-one meetings approach described in this booklet.

Empowerment as an Outcome of your Management There are lots of views about what empowerment actually means. For me it’s mainly about inspiring people at work so that they can get more things done under their own motivation and feel more fulfilled, but without making expensive mistakes or tackling the wrong priorities.

The process I’ve set out in this booklet will work for you without having empowerment as an aim but, if it is something you’re interested in, that’ll support this approach. And perhaps you’re ahead of me, and have already decided that you do want your own management to empower people. You might also believe that unleashing peoples’ potential is an exceptionally rewarding thing to do both for your own team and for the business as a whole. If you want that, this process will help.

Coaching as a Leadership Style Leadership comes in all kinds of flavours and often reflects the mind-set and experiences of the leader themselves. Research suggests that the best leaders continually adapt their natural style to suit the individuals and teams they are leading and the situations they find themselves in.

You can think of a coaching style as one of the many flavours of leadership available to you. In a coaching leadership style, you put your emphasis on the longer-term development of other people. Your style inspires and supports them to maximize their personal and professional potential at the same time as getting stuff done.

Coaching is not the right style to follow all the time and you wouldn’t want to use it to the exclusion of all the other styles of leadership. For example, there will be rare times of crisis when you’d want to be much more directive than coaching in style. Or times when a creative renewal is required and you’ll want to be much more visionary than coaching. In general though, a coaching leadership style will not only help you to get more stuff done, but will support and develop the potential of others so that they can also get even more stuff done and feel more satisfied with it.

If you follow the process described in this booklet and use the kind of questions that I’ve suggested in the main section, then you’re already adopting a coaching leadership style.



The Transition from Doing to Leading This transition needs to happen as your responsibilities increase. The increase can be either horizontal, in terms of the numbers of direct reports you have, or vertical in terms of the depth of complexity of who and what your direct reports are themselves responsible for.

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

It can be an uncomfortable transition to make, as it requires a manager to begin letting go of some of the detail, to increase the emphasis they put on building relationships, to start taking a higher and wider view of the business, and to work on managing capabilities, risks and opportunities rather than individual tasks or projects.

If you’re in that position yourself, the process set out in this booklet will help you to successfully continue with the doing-to-leading transition.

Step Two – Your Own Portfolio of Work As well as having a number of direct reports, many managers also have their own portfolio of work. That is, tasks that they need to complete that are not the responsibility of any of their team members.

Sometimes this kind of portfolio has been built-up by historical accident. Perhaps your predecessor was not great at delegating successfully, or perhaps when those tasks were first identified, there was a lack of capacity on your team.

It’s also quite likely that a manager’s own portfolio of work is there because they have some specialist knowledge, technical skills or abilities that nobody else in their team possesses.

If it might be he case for you, that you’ve your own work to do as well as managing other people in their work, then the leading with one-to-one meetings approach set out in this booklet will help balance-out the pressures of juggling all that.

Here are a few other pointers that have also helped people in similar situations:

• Is it now time to delegate some of your portfolio to a member of your team to help develop them?

• If your portfolio has grown as a result of the growing success of your organisation, is it now time to increase the capacity of your team?

If you can’t delegate those parts of your own work or you can’t increase the capacity of your team, make sure that you keep back enough time to yourself to do actually do the work. Perhaps treat it as if it was a separate (imaginary!) team that you have to spend a proportion of your time focused on.



Step Three – Dealing with Resistance If adopting a leading with one-to-one meetings approach is a new thing for you, or if it’s relatively uncommon in your organisation, you might come up against some resistance.

In my experience, entrenched resistance from your team themselves is actually quite rare. This is mostly because people are often quite hungry for your attention and the one-to-one meetings approach satisfies what is a very basic human need to be valued, seen and recognised. Although staff may at first feel exposed or uncertain about what to expect, with tact, understanding and persistence you can easily work around any resistance they may have.

What can be harder to overcome is the resistance you may experience from colleagues and even bosses. Those around you may be used to a strict command-and-control culture. They may be micro-managers who can’t let go of the detail. They may have trouble trusting people. Or they may be unconsciously afraid of what will happen if you’re going around unleashing people’s potential!

If you experience this kind of resistance you may find that it’s likely to surface in the form of mild criticism. Watch out for comments about how you’re spending so much time with your team and then going home earlier than usual. You may also notice comments about how your staff are behaving, especially if they start asking for information or performing functions that you used to do yourself.

Or you may perhaps experience unconscious resistance in the form of colleagues trying to cram your diary with things that are important to them but which a member of your team could handle.

The best way to deal with this sort of resistance is with a kind of dogged persistence and a lot of ducking and diving. Later on, when others see the results you are getting from your empowered team members, they’re quite likely to begin asking how you’re doing it! And remember what Grace Hopper said: “It’s better to ask forgiveness than to seek permission”.



Step Four – Clarifying Reporting Lines If you work in an organisation where it’s pretty clear already who reports to whom, who your own boss is, who your own team members are and who their team members (if any) are – then you can safely skip this section.

If not, or if there’s any confusion in your mind or in the minds of others about who reports to whom, then you might want to get some clarity around that before implementing this approach.

In my experience, around 50% of the small and medium-sized companies and organisations I’ve coached with have a couple of people working for them who are not entirely clear about who their boss is. In those cases, the kind of systematic but flexible approach to managing their workload that I’m suggesting here either doesn’t happen at all, or is only done infrequently. This is confusing and distracting for the people involved.

In larger companies, a similar situation can occur when the complexity of co-ordinating very diverse workloads requires a kind of matrix arrangement where people may genuinely have several ‘bosses’ who rely on the outputs they produce.

If it might be useful for you to clarify some of the reporting lines for the people you’d like to lead using this one-to-one meetings approach, here are some tips that have helped others:

• Talk to the colleagues who might be affected by any change or clarification. Explain why you’d like to get some clarity around who reports to whom with regard to this team member.

• Talk to the team member themselves. What’s the impact (cost/benefit) to them of not having a clear reporting line? How might they be affected by any change or clarification?

To help decide who should be doing the one-to-one meetings, you might consider these points:

• Who has the capacity and willingness to lead them using this approach?

• Who has the most influence over the resources, information and other things they need in order to do their job well?

• Who is the ‘customer’ for the majority of their outputs?



Step Five – Preparation

Frequency How often should your meetings be?

Given the kind of tasks that your team member is doing, will they be making much progress over the course of a week, a fortnight or a month?

Try to match the frequency of your meetings to the nature of the tasks or information flows involved. Be very cautious about aiming to meet less frequently than monthly – this will likely only be appropriate for highly independent people working on distinct projects with long deadlines. If in doubt, aim for fortnightly meetings and review how it’s going after a month or so.

Duration How long should your meetings be? There are three aspects to consider.

First, the quantity and nature of the tasks that your team member is working on. For example, a large number of relatively simple tasks may require the same amount of time to discuss as a small number of complex tasks.

Second, your own preferences and the preferences of your team member will have an influence. Some people like these meetings to be fast and snappy, whilst others need more time to think about and absorb what you’re discussing.

Third, the decision you made about the frequency of these meetings. For example, if you’ve decided to meet weekly, you’ll probably want shorter meetings than if you’re only meeting monthly.

Remember that you’re wanting to use these meetings as your main vehicle for leading this person and helping them to manage their workload, so they are generally deserving of more time rather than less.

If in doubt, put 90 minutes in your diary for each meeting and plan to review it after the first few have taken place.

Logistics Are you meeting face-to-face, video-conferencing or talking by telephone? Each of those options will work and each has advantages and disadvantages. From a communications point of view, face-to-face meetings have the most ‘channel-richness’; that is, the quality of information exchanged is higher and the risk of misunderstandings is lower. Telephone is the ‘poorest’ of those options but, with practice I reckon is worth about 80% of a face-to-face.

If you can do it, without the effort outweighing the advantage, I’d go for face-to-face whenever possible. Just be mindful that travelling large distances is tiring and can reduce people’s overall effectiveness.

Meeting Space Can you find somewhere comfortable and private to meet? Is there a risk that other people will interrupt you? Will the dynamic work best if you meet in



a ‘neutral’ space or in your office? Could these one-to-one meetings occasionally became a working lunch?

Filing System You’ll probably want to have some way of keeping a record of what’s been discussed as well as somewhere to record things that you need to mention at the next meeting. And it’s especially helpful to encourage your team member to keep their own notes.

I wouldn’t issue formal minutes or anything like that. As a minimum, I would keep a list of the priority tasks that each of my team members is working on, that I’d use to support them at these one-to-one meetings. That list would probably include some brief notes of my own about the deadlines and other key information about each of those tasks and I’d update it at each meeting.

If you want to get fancy, there are some useful apps that work well for this kind of process and, if you don’t already have a favourite, you could take a look at Evernote, Trello or Basecamp. One of those is likely to suit your preferences and all of them are tried and tested apps likely to be around for some time to come.

Other Things to take to the Meetings • Your copy of your team member’s annual appraisal and any objectives

included in that

• Your record of the priorities you both discussed at your previous meeting

• Details of any additional tasks you need to delegate to them.



Step Six – Pastoral Care Checklist Depending on the accepted culture in your organisation, you’ll want to spend a portion of your leadership time on the pastoral care of your team members. That is, taking appropriate steps to do what you can to support their emotional and physical well-being.

Some organisations are more awake to the importance of doing this than others. Whatever the culture where you are, I can’t see how a person can completely discharge their leadership responsibilities without paying at least some attention to these ‘softer’ elements of a team member’s working life.

Even if it is just on a very minimal and functional level, every manager needs to ask themselves: Do I know what I need to do so that this person is able to do their job?

It’s a potentially wide-ranging topic, so I’ve set out below some areas where you’ll want to have some knowledge of how this person is doing, and be ready to offer appropriate support or help them to seek access to such support.

Other things may come up as you go through the more task-focused Coaching Questions in the next section, but these are the areas where your pastoral care, with a softer focus, is an important part of your leadership.

Depending on the frequency of your meetings, you may not want or need to ask about each of these areas every time you meet. Just use this as a checklist about your own understanding and knowledge of this person:

• Their home life – do I know if everything is ok for them outside of work?

• Their health – do I know if they are well and taking care of themselves physically?

• Their concerns – do I know if they have any major concerns or anxieties at the moment?

• Their ambitions – do I know what their personal goals and ambitions are?

• Their relationships at work – do I know how well they are getting on with other people in the business?



Step Seven – Creating Rapport A big part of what makes this leading with one-to-one meetings approach work so well, is that it’s an important opportunity for you and your team member to have some quality time together. If you can run this process effectively for several months, you’ll see increased levels of trust and co-operation, as well as empowering them to find their own motivation and feel more fulfilled.

Actually having that quality time together is a big deal. People at work are often under-recognised and lacking the attention of those they see as leaders. Managers, on the other hand, are often under a lot of time pressure and may also be lacking that recognition and attention from senior leaders themselves. What often fails to be appreciated by everybody is just how significant an act of leadership it is, simply to give somebody your undivided attention for a while.

So just by taking the initiative to create the right space and time, and by being appropriately attentive whist there, you are role-modelling one of the most important aspects of successful leadership!

And you may find that this is enough on its own, without having to concern yourself very much more about the quality of your interaction. Indeed, it’s my view that being able to connect well with other people is such a fundamental human skill, you’ll probably find that getting into a good state of rapport happens quite naturally for you.

On the odd occasion when rapport doesn’t come naturally, perhaps with people who have quite different behavioural patterns from your own, or perhaps when the quality of your connection just needs an extra boost, here are my coaching insider’s expert tips on getting into a good state of rapport with someone:

Social Niceties I’m talking here about the kind of conversational openers that serve two functions. First, giving people time to manage their emotional state. So, for example, taking the time to ask: “How was your journey?” or: “Is it just me, or has it got really cold out again?” are great ways just to slow down the arrival process and give someone a chance to catch their breath. Second, these typical social niceties can be powerful demonstrations that this person already has and deserves your attention: “How was your holiday?”.

Actually Caring You’re going to spend the next 60 minutes or so with one person, talking about their work responsibilities and asking about how they’re doing. And you’re going to be doing this at least once a month for the foreseeable future. You may find that you love doing this. And you may also find that, even though you love it and that you take to this approach like a fish to water, there are times when it can get a bit boring or when this person can seem a bit needy or just plain annoying.



At those times, I’m not going to ask you to fake it and pretend that you care about them and their work tasks. Although for some managers that works just fine as a way of getting through the occasional ‘energy dip’.

Instead, I’m going to ask you to dig a bit deeper and find whatever it takes so that, at least on the outside, it really feels to them like you actually care. This might come from your understanding that the boring bit will pass and get more interesting. It may come from your focus on the outcomes that can be achieved if you can get this person switched-on. It may come from the kind of natural respect that a person like you would give to anybody in that situation, even if you’re not really feeling up to it. Or it may come from the joy at your own ability to inspire others.

Notice their State Take a brief moment at the beginning of a meeting and again every now and then to explore what you notice you about the other person’s inner emotional state and their outer physical state. For example, can you notice if they’re tired, nervous, keen, wary, relaxed, etc?

Doing this is made possible by the way that human brains are wired, with a kind of built-in ability to read other people’s emotional and physical states – a distinct evolutionary advantage for creatures evolved from animals living in social groupings.

Some clues to a person’s emotional state can come from noticing what your own body is doing. So for example, if you’re with somebody who is nervous, you may find that your own breathing becomes shallow and that your mind begins to scan around for danger. This is the same deep-brain mechanism that leads people to say that enthusiasm is infectious, that causes laughter to spread around a room and that makes yawning contagious.

Once you’ve noticed what type of emotional and physical state the other person is currently experiencing, just let that information naturally influence how you respond. So for example, if you notice that somebody seems a bit nervous you might actually mention it, or you might just slow things down a bit to make sure that they’re comfortable and talk about something neutral for a while. Similarly, if you notice that someone is really fired-up and raring to go, you might want to match their enthusiasm levels yourself!



Step Eight – The Coaching Questions

The script When it comes to the business part of your one-to-one meetings, you could literally use the questions on the following page as a script. And of course, you can vary them as and when you want or need to.

These questions are set-up specifically to get certain kinds of results. In Annex A you’ll find some brief notes on the science behind why these questions work.

The language used You may find that some of the construction of and specific words in these questions are not how you’d normally phrase things. That’s because they’re part of a coaching conversation.

Unlike normal conversations where the purpose is often to share information, a coaching conversation is designed to inspire somebody else to maximise their own potential. If you’re into empowering other people like this, and the benefits it can bring for everybody at work, then you’ll find that slipping into a coaching leadership style by using questions like these just becomes second nature with practice.

The investment and the payoff You may also find the first time that you go through your team member’s priority task list like this, that it takes a lot of focus and energy on your part – and also quite a bit of time.

As you do this, you’re also training them to become more self-directed and more self-sufficient, so the investment will pay-off. However, it may only be as you get to the second or even third time of running this kind of one-to-one meeting process with each person that you’ll find it starts to go quickly and smoothly. Stick with it (and them) long enough to reach that easy point.

Your style How you ask a question is also important. Different tones of voice and body language will have a different impact.

If you ask “What are your priorities at the moment?” like a sergeant major on the parade ground, that’ll get a different response from asking it like somebody’s favourite aunty or uncle.

Each way isn’t necessarily better than the other, just more (or less) effective in any given moment. Try to vary your style according to what your intuition tells you will get the best results from a specific person on a specific day.



The Coaching Questions You can use the questions below as a script or just as prompts for the main part of your one-to-one meetings. Try to stick roughly to what is here and the order they’re in, but otherwise feel free to vary them as and when you need to:

• What are your priorities at the moment?

• What else are you working on?

• I have one/some additional priorities that it’s important to add to the list. May we include these?

• Have we got this list in the right order of priority?

Once you have the list of priorities agreed, for most of the items on it you’ll want to run through each of the following questions:

• What do you want to achieve with regards to [item X], and when?

• What are your plans for how you’ll go about doing [item X]?

• What support might you want from me?

• Are there any other resources or people that it’d be useful to have access to?

• What might go wrong – and what are your plans on how we’ll deal with that if it happens?

• How will we know when we’re being successful with [item X] and what are our final measures going to be?

And finally:

• Is there anything else that it’d be helpful for us to talk about today?



Step Nine – Reviewing It’s often worth just asking a few questions at the end of a meeting about how you both felt it went. Don’t be challenging about it, just look for any points of learning.

If you’re feeling up to it, you can also ask about how your relationship with each other is going.

Here’s a few easy questions you can use to help. Just pick the ones that seem most useful to you, and feel free to modify them to suit your own style. Also make sure that you express your own views, the good bits and the improvement opportunities, so that you don’t leave your team member in the dark about your own experience of how it went.

Possible Review Questions: • What’s your sense of how this meeting went?

• What are you finding most useful about these meetings?

• Is there anything we might do differently next time, so that we get even more out of these meetings?

• What’s your sense of how you and I are getting on together?

• What do you find most helpful or supportive in the way we work together?

• What might we do differently in the way that we behave with each other, so that our working relationship is even more effective?

Step Ten – Closing the Meeting What you’ve been doing with this process is creating what us coaches call a “space” – that is, a kind of container for your leadership to operate in and a safe place for your team member to explore how they can best manage their workload and make the most of themselves. Because of that, it’s important that you bring it to a close cleanly. Here are my tips for closing the meeting:

• Stick to your agreed finish time (or agree a new finish time and then stick to that)

• Check that you both know the arrangements for next time

• Have some closing small talk if you like but only a very little. Don’t have it drag on

• Do say something like: “Does that seem about the right point for us to stop today?”

• Use your physical presence to signal an ending: put your things away, stand-up, move

• Do say “goodbye”, “so long” or whatever is appropriate, in a warm and connected way.

• However it went, draw a line under that meeting and move on.



Checklist

1. Empowerment: Do you want to adopt an empowerment mind-set – aiming to empower people so they are motivated to do more themselves?

2. Coaching Leadership Style: Do you want to adopt a coaching leadership style, to help you inspire others to maximise their potential?

3. Transition from Doing to Leading: Is it time for you to make the next step on the transition from doing to leading?

4. Your Work: Have you got a plan for dealing with those elements of your own portfolio of work that can’t be delegated to your team members?

5. Resistance: Is it possible there will be some resistance to you adopting this approach?

6. Reporting Lines: Have you got the reporting lines clarified, so that anybody you’d like to lead using this approach is clear about who reports to whom?

7. Frequency: How often will you be holding your one-to-one meetings?

8. Duration: How long will your one-to-one meetings be?

9. Logistics: Are you meeting face-to-face, video-conferencing or talking by telephone?

10. Meeting Space: Have you got a suitable space arranged?

11. Filing System: Have you got a way of taking notes on what has been discussed that you can refer to next time?

12. Priorities: Have you got a copy of the annual appraisal and any previously agreed objectives?

13. Other Tasks: Have you got information about any other tasks that you’d like to delegate to them at the meeting?

14. Pastoral Care Checklist: Do I know what I need to about the ‘softer’ aspects of this person’s working life?

15. Rapport: If you want to, have a quick brush-up on the Creating Rapport part of the process.

16. Coaching Questions: If you want to, take a copy of the Coaching Questions to use as a prompt.

17. Review: At the end of the meeting take a moment to explore ways to improve the process.

18. Closing: Bring the meeting to a close cleanly.



About Nick Robinson I help leaders and teams to be productive and fulfilled. I'm an Executive Coach and I've been coaching professionally since 1999.

Although my approach is usually pretty light-hearted and informal, I take people's development very seriously. I'm into the practical application of learning and understanding and I like helping people to make their actions as effective as possible. I have hard-skills business qualifications: FCCA and MBA; as well as soft-skills qualifications: Certified Professional Coach, NLP Masters and Newfield Mastery in Coaching.

My coaching usually takes place in either one-to-one sessions or in small group coaching or training sessions for teams or boards of directors.

Previously I worked in senior Finance, Corporate Strategy and Project Director jobs in one of the UK’s largest organisations and also set-up, grew and eventually sold a small international consultancy business. I’ve served on the Institute of Director's regional board and on their national governing Council. I've also been a Non Executive Director and chair of audit at my local hospital trust.

You can find more articles and resources for leaders and teams on my website www.nickrobinson.org or contact me by email [email protected]



Annex A: The Science Behind Those Coaching Questions

1. What are your priorities at the moment? This is an open question, which means that you won’t necessarily know what answers you’ll get and that it asks them to think beyond a yes/no response. Open questions are useful to broaden out the range and quality of a conversation and, at this stage, you’ll want to be doing that.

We’re asking your team member to take responsibility for their own work, so we start with “…your priorities…”.

I’ve also assumed that you’re holding these meetings fairly regularly, so that they become just an extra push on the flywheel to keep things turning over nicely. This is why the question is about priorities “… at the moment”. If that’s not the case, or if you want to change the timescales, just vary that accordingly, for example: “What are your medium-term priorities?”.

2. What else are you working on? Another opening-out question, just intended to get a full picture. Colleagues across the organisation may be asking your team members for their support on things that may be less of a priority to your department. Your team member is also likely to working on things that they ‘just have to do’ and which they might not think of if you only ask for their priorities.

3. I have one/some additional priorities that it’s important to include. May we add these to the list?

In your role as a leader you’ll inevitably know about other priority tasks that need to be included and you’ll often be acting as a kind of job distribution system, handing out tasks to your team members. This is the time to do it.

I’ve used the word “additional” to show that together you’re still building up a complete picture of what your team member is handling at the moment. If you need to override all or many of the other priority tasks (see order of priority, below), change that to something like: “I’ve recently learnt about something that’s important to put right at the top of the list”.

Rather than say “…priorities that we need to include” (or ‘should’), I’ve used the word “important”. I always feel that ‘need’ implies that some external force is coercing you and that you, as their leader, are somehow at the mercy of such forces. It’s better in my view to use ‘important’ which implies that you have measured, weighed and agreed with the significance of this task for yourself.

Notice that I’ve got you asking for permission from your team member: “May we add these…”. This is really just a courtesy way of framing the question, since if they say “No” then you’ve got a bigger problem! Nonetheless, if your relationship can handle that courtesy, it reinforces



the idea that you trust and respect them enough to want them to manage their own priorities.

It’s also important that you know the Why, Who, What and When of this additional task – why is it important, who is it for, what exactly is required, when is it required? See my separate booklet on Really Effective Delegation and Empowerment for more on how to deal with those.

4. Have we got this list in the right order of priority? I’m suggesting you say “we” here because this is now a jointly-agreed list.

Use of the question “…right order…” is both an invitation to assess whether or not it is correct (and, if not, to re-arrange it), and an implication that there is a ‘right’ order to the priorities. Both of these are important if you want team members to be thinking for themselves how they should best juggle competing demands on their time and attention.

Notice that this is a ‘closed’ question, narrowing the options and prompting your minds to look for a “yes/no” response and then to re-sort until you’ve got the right order. My experience has been that a closed question here is more likely to trigger effective action than asking something like “what should the right order be?”.

5. What do you want to achieve with regards to [item X], and when? Now we’re right in the heart of fertile coaching territory and are also on open questions again.

This question puts the emphasis back on “you” (from “we” in the previous question), asking them to take ownership of their work. It uses the power-word “want”, encouraging them to find their own motivation for this task. It’s also heavily outcome-focussed, with the word “achieve”, and the use of “…and when” to give focus and put some attention on the deadline.

6. What are your plans for how you’ll go about doing [item X]? One of the things that I’ve found most useful in empowering and motivating team members is to avoid as much as possible telling them “how” to do things. People get a great sense of accomplishment from figuring out the ‘how’ for themselves – and nothing demotivates more than being told “that’s not how I would do it”!

It’s OK to set some boundaries – for example: “I don’t mind how you do it, but don’t [spend more than X]” – but leave as much space as you can for their own solution to take shape.

Notice also that I’m suggesting you use the word “plans” here. Even if your team member doesn’t yet know how they’ll do this task, you’ll want to be subtly encouraging them to come to one-to-one meetings having thought ahead a bit. This helps your team members to regard themselves as the kind of people who, when faced with a task or a problem, roll-up their sleeves and figure out what they’re going to do about it.



7. What support might you want from me? If you’re anything like me, when you ask question 6 above, you’ll probably need to sit on your hands or bite your lip a bit, rather then telling your team member how you’d go about doing their task. This is probably because you and I are both helpful, solutions-focussed people! However, we also know that a key part of empowering and developing others is giving them the space and confidence to find out things for themselves.

Question 7, the “support” question, is the empowering way for you to offer your help. I think of it like offering the sandwiches round at a party I’m hosting – if people are hungry, they’ll eat and, if not, they won’t. What’s really important to me is that people have a good time at the party, not that they eat my sandwiches (brilliant though they are).

Be prepared to follow-through on your offer though; don’t say it if you don’t mean it. Also be prepared to say “no” to requests that you don’t feel are useful or possible. Compassion, understanding and honesty are good traits to demonstrate here.

8. Are there any other resources or people that it’d be useful to have access to?

Part of a leader’s role is to act as an obstacle-remover and sweep obstructions out of the way of your team members, so that they can get on and do what you’ve tasked them with. Similarly, you’re a channel to other parts of your own organisation and other resources outside it. By now, you should be running your own department’s workload by using one-to-one meetings to delegate as much as possible to your team members. The connections, relationships and resources you now have time to focus on building and maintaining, both within and without the organisation, are a really valuable part of your leadership. Question 8 is where you can offer to hold those doors open for your people.

9. What might go wrong – and what are your plans on how we’ll deal with that if it happens?

Fail to plan; plan to fail.

It’s amazing to me how little actually goes wrong when we make a point of thinking ahead to what might go wrong. But, because we tend to be unconsciously afraid of what can go wrong, we often avoid thinking about it. The great paradox is that most of us are actually much more afraid of the unknown – the shadowy, threatening problems we might have avoided thinking about – than we are of the practical list of actions we can take if the wheels do fall off.

I’ve found that the discipline of doing this can be really useful in boosting people’s self-confidence. It helps take their unconscious fears out into the light where they can be dealt with pragmatically. Stuff does go wrong. Looking at it in advance like this means we can treat it as no big deal. We’ve thought about a contingency, if something bad happens we’ll just roll our sleeves up a bit more and get on with sorting it out.



Notice how I’m suggesting that you say “… how we’ll deal with that…”. This helps remind people that the support and access to resources you talked about in Questions 7 and 8 are also available when things go wrong. Don’t let them feel they have to face it alone.

10. How will we know when we’re being successful with [item X] and what are our final measures going to be?

Lastly, another classic coaching question (well, two in one really), designed to put the mind into a future assessment mode. To answer this question, somebody has to think about: what success will look like along the way; how they’ll know about that; and, when it’s all done and worked out well, how they’d communicate that, through some measurements, to other people. It’ll also help them know when to take corrective action as the task progresses.

I think this is a great question with which to finish each task item, because it triggers this future-oriented mind-set. Do this bit right and people will be itching to get on with it. Don’t be surprised if they have a kind of faraway look in their eyes as they’re imagining the end-point. You may even need to give them a couple of minutes before they can bring their attention back to the present.

11. Is there anything else that it’d be helpful for us to talk about today? This is an opportunity for those important-yet-often-overlooked or hard-to-categorise or trivial-but-worth-a-mention type of issues to come out into the open. I love asking this question with my coaching clients because it gives them permission to mention whatever they want, even if it hasn’t previously been covered in our more structured conversation. Often there’s nothing to say and occasionally there’s something quite powerful.

The Manager’s Guide to Leading with One-to-One Meetings

This short booklet is for busy managers who would like to use a one-to-one meetings approach to help their team members to be more productive and feel more fulfilled.

The basic approach is simple – to use a regular, structured and flexible one-to-one meetings process with each of your team members as your main tool for leading their work efforts.

Using this process, you can inspire people to do more under their own motivation and help them to feel more satisfied about it, but without them making expensive mistakes or tackling the wrong priorities.

Whether you’re already using a one-to-one meetings approach like this but would like to make more of it, or are new to the method please take a look inside.

If you’d like a simple, adaptable yet systematic approach so that you can manage your team in a way that’s empowering for them and dependable for you – this booklet might just help.

Documents

The Managers Guide to Leading with One to One …...2017/01/03 · This short booklet is for busy managers who would like to use a one-to-one meetings approach to help their team