In response to some questions from SneakySly:
Have the 1 on 1s been useful for you guys?
Yup! 1:1s provide a high bandwidth and personalized channel to chat about things that wouldn’t be captured in other settings.
It’s especially important for a remote team as we wouldn’t get much facetime otherwise; but even in-person, carving out dedicated time to talk about higher level issues.
How do you structure them, what are the kinds of things you talk about or questions you ask
- I have a weekly 1:1 with my direct reports and cofounders; and biweekly with most other teammates. I’ve also encouraged James and Stephen to do the same.
- For each 1:1, I have a shared Notion doc where we can write in:
- Topics for the next 1:1 (throughout the next week)
- This is helpful for batching together discussions async
- Notes during the discussion
- Helps keep us on track; writing bulleted notes during a meeting encourages breadth-first search instead of depth-first
- Your mileage may vary; it’s often hard to simultaneously talk and type. (I will write a lot more notes about what my partner is saying) this may be more of a personal Austin quirk than a general recommendation
- TODOs/Action Items as a result of the conversations
- I try to orient the 1:1s away from the day-to-day project updates; standup and Discord are for those. Instead, I try to ask more about meta & things that would fall through the cracks:
- Career growth: are they excited by what they’re working on, are they learning
- Blockers: is there something I can do to make their life a lot easier?
- Their overall mood, feeling on various team processes, interpersonal issues
- Exploratory ideas: spitballing, brainstorming new things to tackle
- Soliciting feedback in both directions
- I’ll often ask both me and my partner to come up with 1 piece of positive feedback, and 1 piece of critical feedback
- One thing I’ve been meaning to do (but haven’t gotten around yet) is to formalize some of this structure into a template
- Sometimes we just don’t have that much to say on a 1:1. That’s okay! You can end early if you both come up with nothing.
- Having them regularly anyways makes it so that important issues have a regular release valve, rather than building up pressure into a big scary issue.
- Also I just generally like the people on my team and enjoy spending casual time chatting :)
Do you have any recommended reading that would be useful either in this area or just adjacent team management kind of stuff