What should I actually be covering in my one-on-one meetings with employees, especially when we already have project meetings and standup meetings and so many other meetings? This is a question I get asked a lot when I am training emerging leaders and new managers. And so I want to just share a couple of ideas about why one-on-ones are so important and then give you a framework for holding those meetings so that they are productive and useful and add value, not just to the employee, but also to you as well. So one-on-ones are often the only recurring private leadership space.

So what do I mean by private leadership? Well, personal leadership is how you lead yourself, and public leadership is how you lead the whole team, how you behave in a meeting in front of everybody and that sort of thing. But private leadership is what happens in that one-on-one space with one other person. So somebody who directly reports to you, or the same is true for your one-on-one meetings with your own manager. Now, if you waste them on status updates, you lose out on a lot. So here are a handful of things that you lose out on if you're just going over like a bulleted list of things that could go in a status report.

You lose out on the, on the ability to detect problems early. You lose out on career development conversations that are going to help the person stay engaged and motivated in working, not just for you and your team, but in the company at large. You lose out on an opportunity to create psychological safety. That is a place where they can take risks and ask the dumb questions. And you also lose the ability to develop trust, and that trust works in both directions. So when you're not having one-on-ones, you're missing out on all of those things. Plus, the biggest loss is alignment. Because the biggest reason for having one-on-ones is to make sure that you and the employee are aligned on the work that they're doing and why they're doing that work.

Okay. Again, you lose alignment and you lose all those other things if you're not having one-on-ones. There is a great organizational cost to skipping the one-on-ones. I want you to think of it this way. You know, I'm the user experience guru and I like to put the user experience hat on. So a one-on-one is not a meeting. It's a designed interface between you and your employee. If the interface is poorly designed, even smart people will struggle with it and wonder what the heck they're doing in this one-on-one.

So from a UX perspective, a one-on-one meeting is going to reduce cognitive load. It's going to surface any friction that's hanging out, maybe even on the fringes, but it's going to surface that friction so that it can be dealt with. It's going to create visibility of the system state. So the employee is going to understand why they're doing things and how it fits into a bigger picture. And the manager, that is you, is going to understand where the employee might be off in that, and then you can get that alignment back in place. And it's also going to tighten up those feedback loops because employees need to know where they stand and how they're doing. And what the research shows on new employees is that they need more feedback and they need more positive feedback as well because they're living in a sea of uncertainty and they don't know if they're doing things right. So if this is a newer employee, you want to err towards more feedback and more positive feedback, and that can be in those one-on-ones as well.

I mean, don't give them positive feedback if it's not merited. I don't mean to blow smoke, but I do mean that when they are on the right track, you want to acknowledge that. Because if you've heard me talk at any length, you've probably heard me say, what gets acknowledged gets repeated. So again, when those newer in tenure employees are on the right track, make sure they know that. All right, so back to the one-on-ones though. I want to offer up a repeatable structure that's going to do all of those exact things we were just talking about in every one-on-one. Now, you don't have to use it as a rigid agenda. Instead, you can just use it as a framework that you use to tailor your one-on-one, or if you want to use it as an agenda, that works too.

It's the focus, friction, forward motion framework. Now, if you've been a longtime listener to the podcast or even not that long time of a listener to the podcast, I did talk about this a couple of months ago in episode 250, and the title of that episode was Make It Obvious: The Leadership Cost of Being Unclear. And that issue or that episode was essentially about affordances. And affordances, I'll talk about affordances in a second, but we'll link up the show notes to that episode, janelanderson.com/250. That was the link to the show notes for that episode, but we'll link that episode up in the show notes for this episode. This is episode 259. You can find the show notes for this episode at janelanderson.com/259.

So in episode 250, I talked about affordances. So affordances are the qualities in an environment or an object or a system that make it absolutely obvious how it should be used without any instructions. So it's a signal that tells you what to do with it without having anyone have to explain it to you. So affordances are all about making it totally obvious what to do in a given situation or with a given product. And there's no better way to design a one-on-one with— than with the focus— and there's no better way to design a one-on-one than with the focus, friction, forward motion framework. So let's go through that framework and we're going to tailor that framework to a one-on-one meeting. Okay. Number 1, focus.

Focus is all about what matters most right now. This is the alignment conversation. You want to be talking to the employee about what matters most to them and find out what they think is the most important thing right now. And then if you need to do some recalibration, This is where you'll bring them back into alignment by telling them what's most important to you. So let's say the employee is new and they're trying to charge through things and get work done and feel like a valuable contributor on the project. But maybe what you want them to do is just like learn how we do stuff here. So that would be a good opportunity where you uncover what matters most to them and what matters most to you. Are not in alignment, and then this is a good opportunity for that recalibration.

So why does this even matter? Well, technical managers, especially, and this is true for other managers as well, but technical managers and employees especially tend to be misaligned on priority. This is also true if you happen to be working in a hybrid or remote working environment. It's really easy to get misaligned on priority because when you're working in a vacuum, let's say by yourself, at home, whether that's some of the days or all of the days, it's really easy to get myopically focused on one little thing that you're working on. And maybe that isn't the most important thing. So this is where having that dialogue is really going to bring that calibration back into play. So if you're the manager, I want you to be asking this question. What's the most important thing that you're working on right now? What's the single most important thing that you're working on right now? Like the word priority in its definition is that it is the one most important thing. Now we often talk about priorities in plural, But technically there would be one singular priority.

Okay. So asking what's the most important thing that you're working on right now? And then is there anything that's competing with that, making it hard for that to be the priority? So when we think about tying this back into user experience and UX thinking, if you're not creating a shared visibility of the priority, you are silently creating misalignment. Let me just repeat that. If you are not creating shared visibility of the single priority for that employee, you are creating silent misalignment. So you want to get on the same page. That should be the very, very first thing you do is focus. Is the employee focused on what you want them to be focused on, or do you need to do some misalignment? All right. Step 2 in this process, friction.

What is getting in your way? And this is where the gold is in that conversation. So you might ask some questions like this: Where is work harder than it should be? Or where is this process harder than it should be? Where are you stuck? Or is there any cross-team friction I should know about? So that could surface interdependencies with other teams. It could surface some issues between, you know, personality conflicts within team members. It could surface maybe somebody is holding back or not available that your employee that you're having the one-on-one with needs to be more connected with. So you just want to ask some questions that surface any friction that might be there in, in the system, in the employee's world over the course of the last week because friction is, it's feedback. Friction is designed feedback. It's not complaining. Think of it as data.

So if you've got an employee who's saying like, well, this person isn't getting back to me in a timely fashion, I don't want you to turn that into like, this person's doing, that other person's doing something wrong. Presumably that other person has some other priorities that are getting in the way of getting back to your employee in the timely fashion. So that's friction. And again, friction is neither inherently bad nor good, but friction tells you things. It's a signal. And you can use that friction as feedback, and then you can start to get to the bottom of what's going on with that feedback. So this also is shifting managers away from saying, like, tell me all the things you got done and tell me all the things that are on your to-do list for next week, because that can easily be handled in a status report. So you're shifting away from, you know, show me which boxes you've checked towards a conversation that's more like, tell me what's slowing you down.

Tell me where you're getting stuck. And that is a much more leadership-forward approach to take in a one-on-one meeting. All right, now let's go on to step 3, forward motion. And that is, what support do you need from me as your manager in order to make forward motion and continue the momentum on the things that you're working on? And this prevents passive one-on-ones. And as the manager, as the leader, you're likely to get some things on your to-do list here too. But that is part of your job is to be in service of your employee and to make the space available for them to get their work done. So, do you need any decisions from me? Is there any place where you need air cover? Like you need me to like advocate for you? Maybe it's with an interdisciplinary thing and somebody is not getting back to them. Maybe.

Maybe you're the person who, whether you need to step in and intervene, or maybe just simply get CC'd on an email requesting the information that you need, so, or that that employee needs. And then, you know, another great question to ask in this part of the one-on-one is, what would make next week go better for you? What would make next week smoother for you? Now, as you sit back and think about these 3 steps in this 3-part framework, and it is again, Focus, friction, and forward motion. When you think about this framework in the context of one-on-ones, I want you to be left with this idea that a well-designed one-on-one is going to reduce errors before they happen. It is going to, it is going to reduce friction, and it is ultimately going to make that employee more productive and more felt, seen, and heard. Now, let me just quick get out 3 common mistakes. Actually, no, let me give you 4 because There's a lot of common mistakes people make in one-on-ones, but let me just give you 4 quick common mistakes people do in one-on-ones so that you can avoid them. Number 1, letting the employee come into that meeting unprepared. The employee should never come unprepared.

You should, at a minimum, be asking them what their friction points are so that they're at least coming, you know, asking them what's their top priority, that focus piece, and then what friction are they experiencing in getting that top priority done or anything else done. Okay? So don't let them come unprepared. They should know to be prepared with those two things, and they don't have to write a report or design a slide for that. It can just be a couple of notes jotted down in their notebook. All right. Another— so that was common mistake number one, that the employee comes unprepared. Common mistake number two, you turn it into your agenda only. Like, you are all talk and they are all listen.

Okay? That is not a good one-on-one. So mistake number two is it's all about you and your agenda. Mistake number 3, canceling when things get busy. You know what? Things get busy all the time, and it's even more important to have the one-on-ones when things are busy because the opportunity for misalignment increases exponentially when things are really busy. Also canceling when there's quote unquote nothing to talk about. I've got nothing new. Well, we're still going to talk about focus, friction, and forward momentum. We can always talk about focus, friction, and forward momentum.

What potentially happens when one-on-ones get consistently canceled is then that's the norm. And then to bring it back feels like something's wrong, which leads me right into the fourth thing, fourth common mistake for you to avoid. And that is to use a one-on-one only when something is wrong, because if that's the only time you're meeting with employees is when something has gone off the rails, then that is a signal that something's wrong. They're going to come in feeling defensive and it's just not going to go well. Okay. So again, quickly, the four mistakes to avoid. That the employee comes unprepared, that it's all about you and your agenda, that you cancel it when things get busy, or you let the employee cancel it when things get busy, and you use it only when something is wrong. Now, if your one-on-ones are happening only when there's a problem, they become associated with threat.

And we don't want them associated with threat because then they're not going to do all those things like alignment and psychological safety and all those things we talked about at the beginning. All right. Before we go, though, a quick thought on the cost of not doing them. Okay. The biggest cost of not doing one-on-ones is misalignment. And when you and your staff members are misaligned, the wrong work gets done. And on the other side of that is a great amount of team risk and potentially organizational risk if people are too focused on the wrong things. So that is the cost.

All right. So my challenge for you in the next one-on-one that you have with any and all of your employees, try the focus, friction, forward momentum structure. Write those 3 words at the top of your notes. Or here's another thing that you can do. If you use like a Word doc, open up the header and at the top of the header in your meeting, put focus, friction, forward motion, or just structure your talking points and your agenda for the meeting. Focus, friction, forward motion. All right. So try that out in your next set of one-on-ones and see what changes.

And if you are an individual contributor listening to this episode, you can use this as well. You can either ask your manager to cover things in that order in your one-on-one, focus, friction, and forward motion. And if you feel uncomfortable, just blame it on me and send them the link to this episode so that they can listen to it themselves and know the philosophy behind it. Or you can simply guide the conversation yourself in that way, focus, friction, forward motion. All right, my friends, we will catch you again next week right here on the Working Conversations Podcast. Be well.