Your First One-on-One, Impact, Objections, and the Future of Work
Posted on
October 7, 2021
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In this Issue
Your first one-on-one: there’s lots of 1:1 advice out there, but not much about the first one you ever have. It’s easy to get wrong, and we want to help new managers ace it.
Your impact as a manager: sometimes it can be hard to feel you’re making a difference, especially compared to other roles, but one leader has a great way of looking at it.
No Objection ≠ Agreement: a lack of objections does not mean everyone agrees with you. Here’s a few ways to move forward when your ideas are met with an awkward silence.
The future of work is written: as schedules creak with virtual meetings, more distributed teams are looking to move more communication into writing. We look at how.
How to Nail Your First One-on-One Meeting as a New Manager
If you Google ‘one-on-one meetings’, you’ll find articles with some sound advice but which generally assume you’ve already begun having 1:1 meetings or know how to start.
There seems to be much less guidance for new managers for the first time they step into the room.
This is an issue, because a lot of the advice for running great 1:1s over time isn’t that relevant for that first meeting.
That meeting isn’t your typical 1:1 and it’s often when you need help the most.
We’ve gathered best practice from a range of great authors to bring you the advice we wish we’d had when we were starting out.
One of the mental changes we all have to make when we become managers is that we often lose the satisfaction and gratification of doing work that makes an immediate impact.
We don’t spend all our time shipping code, or designing features, or launching marketing campaigns, or presenting reports. All things which tangibly delight customers and our colleagues. Or if we still do, we’re doing it wrong.
Instead we spend our time advising, coaching, coaxing, contextualizing, meeting, and coordinating.
The impact of this - teams of happy, diverse employees delivering sustained high performance - is remarkable. But that impact isn’t felt every day.
Sometimes it can feel like you’re not having much impact at all.
Now, you may be lucky enough to have management cheerleaders within your organisation who will remind you of the fact that your role is arguably the most important (and undervalued) at the company. But it can be quite hard to articulate exactly why that’s the case.
It’s why we loved this framing from Joanna Miller, Lead of Organizational Effectiveness & Coaching at Asana, about the significance of being a manager from her conversation with Liz and Mollie:
‘If you’re a people manager, your team’s friends and family have likely heard about you.’
It’s very simple but it does a wonderful job of signifying the impact that you have in the role. Now, as Miller notes, this isn’t meant to be taken in a negative way - as if every mistake you make will be reported to your team’s loved ones. It works both ways.
You have the opportunity to help create a career and workplace which will dramatically impact someone’s life to the extent that they’ll tell those closest to them about what you’ve done for them.
Not many other colleagues get to say that.
No Objection ≠ Agreement
We’ve all been in those meetings where you present an idea for consideration, there’s a couple of comments, but largely an awkward silence.
You know that there are things being left unsaid.
It could be because people are just tired, or they could be uncomfortable discussing the topic publicly, or it could be that your preferred management style is ‘crushing dissent’.
Either way, you have two options. You can either say ‘Great, glad everyone’s agreed’ and move onto the next thing, or you can choose to pause and dig deeper.
It’s a good reminder that when those silences happen, we should resist the temptation to move on, and do the work to find out what our teams really think.
This may involve some of the following:
Asking clarifying questions: if you suspect there are questions that aren’t being voiced about a part of your proposal, try asking them yourself to get the conversation moving.
Moderating the discussion: as the conversation (hopefully) starts to move, it’s your responsibility to be proactive and make sure it’s inclusive. The louder voices shouldn’t drown out others.
Following up privately: some people won’t be comfortable talking publicly. This may be exacerbated by power dynamics in the room and/or if the issue is particularly contentious. If you think someone has something to give but seems reticent, rather than calling them out in the room, consider approaching them privately afterwards for their view.
Changing your decision-making style: this whole piece assumes that getting everyone to agree and achieving consensus is a good thing. Of course, it is, but sometimes the path to getting there can be so long and tortuous that it compromises the broader objective of achieving an outcome. That’s not to say you should move to directly issuing commands (don’t do this) but you should be able to resort to a ‘disagree and commit’ process where you acknowledge and respect any objections, explain your decision, but make a choice not to wait for consensus on a specific issue in order to move forward.
The Future of Work is Written
If you’re going to have an article title like that, it better be a good read.
Fortunately software engineering leader Juan Pablo Buriticá’s piece for Stripe’s Increment magazine on this topic is as eloquent and engaging as you would hope, taking in the history of remote work via the Catholic church, NASA and IBM. If that sounds like your type of thing, check out the full piece.
Amid the story-telling though, we can pick out some valuable advice for any team looking to evolve their culture to one where writing plays a greater part in communication.
It has taken nearly 2 years, but many companies are waking up to the fact that moving all that informal office communication into formal virtual meetings has been a disaster for people’s diaries and mental health. The answer is shifting some of it instead into writing, and Buriticá has some thoughts.
Dependence on proximity is a weakness: if you can’t work effectively when distributed, then your team will always be vulnerable when there isn’t a physical, temporal, and/or cultural overlap (as has been forced on many businesses in the past 18 months). A team which can operate whilst distributed is a far more resilient one - whether to a pandemic, or just the fact that half the team want to attend a conference that afternoon.
Decision-making will improve: good decision-making is ‘enabled by access to relevant information, good judgment, and agency to decide.’ The right documentation structures should ensure that everyone has the information they need, when they need it. When thinking about your own writing culture, think about the decisions that need to be made and how you can most effectively get the relevant information to where it needs to be.
Collaboration needs managing: it’s not as simple as creating spaces for teams to share ideas in writing and then assuming it will just ‘work’. Documents and threads can become at best unwieldy, and at worst, areas where some participants feel unsafe contributing. These spaces need individuals who are responsible for their management, ensuring that ideas are nurtured and shared in an effective and safe way.
Someone has to do all the reading: the solution is not to write everything down. As he says, ‘If reading every message and document is important, then nothing is really that important.’ Employees shouldn’t have to work out whether a document is relevant, or where to find the most up to date version. Build documentation processes with this in mind.
This could be a full time job: as Buriticá notes, given the benefits of doing this well, it’s not outlandish to suggest that in future we could see full-time jobs dedicated to evolving and marshalling writing culture at companies. He mentions ‘librarians’ of company documentation. Whilst this is unlikely to be applicable to your team at this stage, it gives an indication of both the immense gains to be realised from a written culture, but also the effort in making the change.
It’s not about replacing human interaction: even in a piece claiming that the future of work is written, Buriticá still acknowledges that some forms of work are better in-person, and we should acknowledge those and nurture those too.