How to have great 1:1’s

To have great one-on-one’s, it starts with setting clear expectations to discuss. 

Imagine you and your colleagues are walking on a path, and at the end of this path lies the overall vision of where your company is headed. As you walk down this path, you encounter boulders that must be removed in order to keep going, but these boulders are too big for your team to roll aside. However, if a hammer on an excavator breaks up the boulder into smaller rocks, each person can now remove a rock from the path, allowing you all to continue to move towards the vision.

Ideally, you are creating your 90-day Rocks based upon the leadership team’s 90-day priorities. These would have been decided on at their quarterly meeting to drive towards their  1-year plan and 3-year picture. If you do not have this, that is OK! You can still decide what your 90-day priorities are going to be with your boss.

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Narrowing your focus down to 3-5 Rocks in the next 90 days creates traction. 90 days creates short-term FOCUS and minimizes the overwhelm of the monumental, overall vision. What are the 3-5 most important things that you need to get done in the next 90 days?

Earlier in my career, my team’s annual goals were pushed down through 5 or 6 layers of management prior to reaching me. They then had to create an annual goal for my team based upon this high-level initiative which I struggled to connect with, and subsequently, my team struggled to see the path to consistent, daily progress towards achieving this goal.  Unfortunately setting these goals became a way to check a box instead of moving my job, my department, and my company forward.

With this new process, writing down the Rocks drives accountability for the employee and the manager. As a manager, it’s easy to see shiny things and want to change direction. Having Rocks defined helps constrain the priorities for the next 90 days. The shiny things can be documented and discussed at the next quarterly meeting when Rocks are decided upon again. Every week in my employees’ one-on-ones, they listed the Rocks as on track or off track. If they were on track, we didn’t talk about them. If they were off track, we discussed how we could get them back on track. 

This process is defined in Gino Wickman’s book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business. I highly recommend it.