Transform your 1:1 meetings into a source of insight

As a team lead, you have the chance and responsibility to support your direct reports and help them progress. One-to-one meetings are a powerful tool for achieving this goal. They are the reserved moment in your week for each employee, the time where you devote all your attention to them, their work, and growth. However, they can easily become mundane and take a reporting flavour. How do you make sure that this weekly ritual generates insights and allows you to provide valuable advice? Let’s take this step by step. <h2>1. Do you need to have a weekly meeting?</h2> If you have 15 direct reports, the idea of having a weekly 1:1 with each person in your team can sound straight out crazy. My advice would be to challenge the organisation but this is not the subject of this article. You clearly cannot fit 15 1:1s in the same week, or you will become a professional 1:1 player. In this situation, try a 30-minute slot every other week and make it crystal clear that the meeting should be prepared in advance. More about this later. If you are in the other 99% of the population, you have a reasonably sized team of 7 direct reports or less. Then yes, please take the time for a weekly 1:1 with each one of them. The goal of each check-in is to make sure you have a dedicated private time with each person. It shows you respect them, that you support them, that you are the manager who is on their side and that they can rely on. Do your best not to move around or cancel the 1:1 check-ins. Otherwise, you send a signal of disrespect to your employees and show that you have something better to do than talk to them. <a href="https://medium.com/@simondelana/transform-your-1-1-meetings-into-a-source-of-insight-f0f9426ef797">Learn More</a>