5 Questions to ask in EVERY One-on-One Meeting

Welcome back to my channel, I'm Cyrus and this is Cyrus Codes where we talk about engineering, engineering management, and general career advice for engineers, whether you're just starting out or have been an engineer for years. I hope I can help you. the next step in your career or figuring out how to solve some of the problems that you're facing in your career right now today we're going to talk about one on ones now one on ones are a really important part of my life as a manager, they're a part important of my life as a report;

You have to remember that all managers have managers, and there are many different ways to do it, there is no right answer and really one to one. -In some cases the topics can be quite a controversial topic, there is not much agreement on how often it should be done, what should be talked about and all those kinds of little details that, in my opinion, can really make or undo the success of the one-on-one as a ritual you have in your life. I thought today would be something that would be helpful to be really specific about how I do one-on-ones, what I want to get out of them, the types of

questions

I ask, and the expectations I set with my reports when we first meet or in our

meeting

s. first sessions.

I think the best way to do this is to talk about the document template one on one. that I use, I'm actually going to share it in the description of this video so you can take it and borrow it and remix it and use it however you want, but I asked five specific

questions

at the top of that one on one. doc to refresh my reporting minds and I also have a little paragraph that sets expectations for what I expect to come out at that time and what I think we'll use it for, just to set the stage.

I like to have individual

meeting

s

every

week with the people who report to me today, there are between six and nine individual meetings per week. There is no right or wrong amount. Teams grow and change all the time, but I really like meeting with the people who report to me

every

week so I can make sure I'm really informed of all the different things that are being worked on within the engineering part of the organization. which I am responsible for when we meet we always meet for half an hour, it's actually 25 minutes just to have time to move between my meetings, but it's enough time to really talk about at least a few important topics and I find that if I set the tone correctly we use all of the time almost always, so the three things that I tell my reports and then I have them at the top of my individual document or that I want to use our individual time for them to do three things are number one share the results of your work, it does not update the status of the results of your work, this relates to my other video on management, which I will put in the description below;

The second thing is that I want to have a continued focus on professional development, so I want to hear about those moments where maybe there was a challenge that they overcame that relates to the goals that we have set for this current cycle and the third thing What is super important is feedback that is upward for me or for others. to their peers and also feedback to cross-functional people, maybe product managers or designers that they found themselves working with, creating an environment for continuous feedback that is actually a video in itself, so with that table I said there are five questions what I use to get their minds going to things that they can use as a reference if they are thinking to themselves before our face-to-face meeting.

Not much has actually happened this week. So what are those five questions? The first question is really open-ended and super simple. is what has been on your mind this week this question is very open and it is open by design. I want to make sure that if there is something maybe in the person's personal life or something that happened in a professional context that has really been dragging them down. below even if it does not relate to the results or your objectives or comments. I just want to create a little space for them to talk about it, you never know what's really overwhelming someone and it just creates an ambiguous space for them.

Being able to talk about whatever is on your mind is a super important way to start. The second question that I really like is how happy and productive did you feel this week and when this is a really fun question that I was asked because today. I'm not very close to the day-to-day work of all the people I'm responsible for, and so when I ask a question like this, it gives me a little insight into the incredible moments that have happened and can, in fact, be created almost by accident. feedback moments for other people that I can pass on and the person I'm talking to may not realize it, but they can share a story with me that is actually really positive feedback or speaks to someone else's goals or areas of development. on their team and so talking about where they felt productive not only lets me know what works really well for them and what kinds of things really make them happy in their work, but it's also a really unique kind of backchannel. for me. positive comments about the people you work with every day the third question and this one is a bit of an art is where did you feel friction in the last week?

I encourage people to keep incoming things as microscopic as a one-on-one conversation. Since they came to Public Relations, they were working on a meaning that they were in. I want to make sure that friction isn't just something related to your team's process and how they do things, but it can also be moments of interpersonal tension that they find themselves in. I have had with another person. I've seen this question many different ways. I have seen that in some cases it would be as simple as getting feedback on a particular process that the team is following through to the other side. where I learn, after peeling back a couple of layers, that this person is actually having real interpersonal issues with another person on their team, something they may not have easily brought up, but after framing the conversation as a friction they're feeling and asking again With a few questions, it becomes clear that it is very important for me as a manager to offer advice on triaging this situation.

This question in many ways ends up being an opportunity for me to get feedback that I can channel to two team leaders I work with. an opportunity to get feedback on other people and whether perhaps they are stunted in some areas of growth that we have identified in many ways. This is actually the most important question for me as I'm figuring out how I can help my reports, does it make sense if you think about it? I'm explicitly asking for constructive criticism on all kinds of things and then using them not only individually but also together to find out where there are hot spots in the organization that I work on the fourth question which focuses on the team in the squad, so in this case consider it as the most local or specific group of people that this engineer is working with;

Better yet, we organize ourselves into squads, so maybe it's like four to six engineers a week. product manager and a designer who work very closely together every day, so this question really focuses on team productivity and effectiveness, so the question asks what amplifies team productivity and what drags it down is really interesting because sometimes the answer deals with tensions or maybe miscommunications between engineering, product and design, like the legs of the stool, its sides of the triangle, that work together every day, but what I discovered is that in It's actually a really unique way to get upward feedback which is to Something very common that comes up when I ask people a question like this is feedback on the strategy we're following as an organization in the quarter, so maybe it's a look by Cyrus.

I feel like we have too much on our plate. This quarter I feel like we have a current project and it's running on a little bit of time and I'm worried it's going to throw off the rest of our quarterly plans, so this is really helpful because I can get out of any planning. issues we might have, talk to a product manager, talk to other stakeholders, and make sure that as you get feedback from my engineers, you have the right context to make changes or try to reset expectations with the people who report to us It's also a great way to see if the things your team talks about in retrospectives maybe you do retrospectives maybe not, but the idea that if there are any commitments that your team has made to make improvements Over time, doing this question is a good way to see if those things are still coming up correctly.

It's almost an accountability mechanism to ask if we're making the improvements we promised we would make or if there are persistent problems that are still emerging. It can also reveal super tactical things, as you can predict, it can help me learn that when a certain person is out of the office, code review slows down or certain types of knowledge are absent and it wasn't until that person left that the team. I realized that correctly, so this can highlight for me where perhaps there are skills or knowledge gaps within teams that affect team productivity directly and then last but not least, the fifth question.

I always do this the same way because I want it to be that way. It seems like a question that people have heard before and are comfortable with because, at first glance, it can actually be an uncomfortable question. Okay, let's get right to it. The question is: what feedback do you have for me, your manager, and where can I lean on you? and where can I get information about the nature of this question: the ideal is to get super direct feedback from my reports. Now it's not often that people are willing to sit across from you and give you really direct feedback;

They aren't either. They're always ready, they have a lot of things going on in their lives, and sometimes that kind of feedback is easier to provide through a more structured review process, whether it's quarterly or annually, but the second part of the question is where should I look? It's helpful to me because it gives people a chance to say, I was actually hoping I could get your help with something or this situation actually came up and I'm not totally sure how to approach it. I would really like you to help me. just at least leaning on me in this conversation right now and helping me clarify this, almost explicitly gives permission to people who might be trying to prove that they're capable of handling something on their own or have a question that maybe not, maybe not, they don't want to feel like they're bothering me, which of course they never do, it just gives them that explicit permission to say: where can I particularly help you now?

On the other hand, what can I say? This is also a useful question because sometimes people explicitly want the opportunity to handle something on their own and often for me as a manager I know what kind of responsibilities someone is currently taking on. I have delegated to them a leadership challenge that I am currently putting them through and so I know when I ask them where they want me to step in or where they want me to give them more space to address the challenges they are facing. I usually have something specific that I ask in context and so it may seem like an ambiguous question at first, but I find that it's usually related to something specific, so as an example, let's say someone reporting to me. is running a project right now and for some reason recently I've been more involved with the project than not, maybe it's because there are certain areas of growth that I know they're focusing on right now, I want to make sure I'm them.

I'm supporting you when you face that category of challenge, maybe one person, so I'll give you an example. I usually know it again. I know what someone is actively working on or what specific challenges they might be facing, so let's say we challenged someone to develop leadership skills by leading a project, but when they started to abandon that project, we agreed that something they were going to need support is in having difficult conversations with the product about what the requirements are, maybe they don't feel as comfortable rejecting in the product as other people with more experience do, so let's say, for example, throughout your project, I have been playing a tactical support role and being present in conversations where they talk to the product not to dominate the conversation, but perhaps to help guide it.

Towards a more accurate representation of the concerns this person is trying to express now. If I talk to you face to face and ask you a question like where can I look? I'm not just going to ask that. Generally, I'm going to contextualize that around the specific topic, so you mightsay: listen, the conversations we've been having with products have been great and I can tell that you are getting more comfortable and pushing back against the requirements, but I want to make sure that you feel like I'm giving you enough space, would you feel comfortable if such Maybe I'll let you take the next two conversations about the product and you can tell me how it went and where you felt challenged because at this point I think you already?

I've seen a couple of good examples of how you can guide the conversation towards what you're trying to achieve correctly, so in some ways I'm giving them permission to tell me where I can peek in and in other ways it's just an opportunity to create a conversation. . around where I might actually just want to give them a little more space and let them fend for themselves in the context of a particular challenge that I know they're facing, so those are the five questions that I talk about in each one on one. -again and again you don't always get to all of them, sometimes you end up having an agenda that really dominates your time and ideally sticks to the three principles of talking about results, talking about feedback and talking about professional growth, but these five questions are A great way to make sure you always have something really valuable to talk about with your reports again.

Those five in order are number one. What's on your mind this week? Number two: where have you felt most productive? and what did that really do? It looks like number three, where do you feel friction? Whether it's conversations, meetings, executing your work, etc., number four, what's really accelerating team productivity and what's dragging it down, and lastly, number five, what feedback do you have for me? , your manager and where can I support you? on and where do you want me to give you more space thank you so much for watching if you liked this video go ahead and subscribe to the channel or go ahead and hit the like button too it would be very helpful for me and if I like this video check out my others again on this channel.

We talk a lot about engineering, the engineering career, how to be a better engineering manager and hopefully it will help you on your path. See you later.