Management skills
Better team meetings and one-on-ones: use them to keep your team in balance
Meetings are where managers spend most of their time, which makes them the best tool for keeping a team balanced, and the easiest place to fall out of balance. Here’s how to design them on purpose.
Most managers don’t design their meetings. They inherit them, add to them, and eventually find their week full of conversations that cover the same ground, while the important things get squeezed into the margins.
Here’s a different way to think about it. The things we do most often are the best vehicles for balance, and managers spend more time in meetings than almost anywhere else. That makes meetings and one-on-ones the most powerful tool you have for keeping a team healthy, and the most common place where things drift out of balance.
Balance across the four domains
Team performance happens at the intersection of the four domains: vision, process, relationships, and problem solving. A good meeting rhythm makes room for each. A lopsided one quietly tilts the team. Meetings that are all updates starve vision and relationships. Meetings that are all firefighting crowd out everything else.
Design a meeting rhythm, not just meetings
- Short, frequent meetingsInformation sharing and alignment
- Regular project meetingsMoving workstreams forward and making decisions
- Less frequent, longer sessionsProgress monitoring and strategic planning
Each kind of meeting is a container sized for a specific kind of work. Trust and relationship building should be woven through all of them, not saved for the annual retreat.
One question changes a lot of meetings: how could you share information some other way, so your meeting time goes to actually advancing the work? A short written update, a shared channel, or a simple weekly template can free up hours.
A balanced one-on-one agenda
One-on-ones work best with a consistent agenda, so both people know what to expect and nothing important gets skipped. A balanced agenda touches all four domains:
- RelationshipsPersonal updates and interpersonal feedback, in both directions.
- Problem solvingTop-of-mind challenges and anything urgent.
- ProcessProgress and next steps on the roadmap, and alignment on how the work will get done.
- Vision and strategyChanges in context, and realigning on where the work is headed.
Don’t skip the relationship block. It’s what gets a one-on-one beyond status updates to the personal and interpersonal conversations where trust is actually built. And make room for delegation as a standing topic, so you can calibrate together over time.
Stay dialed in on problem solving
Meetings are also where a manager’s problem-solving habits show. When someone brings you a problem, how do you feel? An adrenaline rush, dread, eagerness, frustration? Your answer says a lot about your problem-solving persona: first responder, puzzle solver, speedster, thrill seeker, or ostrich.
Under calibrated
Problems are avoided or ignored until they’re too big to ignore. People wait for someone else to swoop in.
Team feelsStressed, unsupported
Dialed in
Moves straight toward problems without hunting for them, anchors solutions to the vision, and knows when to bring others in.
Team feelsCalm, curious, decisive
Over calibrated
Always in reaction mode. Solved problems become the measure of success, and the team depends on you to fix everything.
Team feelsFrantic, dependent
It also helps to know what kind of problem you’re facing. Technical problems have known solutions; they mostly need time, money, and expertise. Adaptive challenges are different. The problem is hard to define, the solution requires learning, and the obstacles are hearts and minds, values, loyalties, and relationships. (The distinction comes from Ronald Heifetz and colleagues’ work on adaptive leadership.) Treating an adaptive challenge like a technical one is one of the most common ways teams get stuck.
Adaptive challenges need a different kind of conversation, with the right people, over time. That’s where navigational leadership comes in.
Try this
- Where is your team meeting rhythm over calibrated? Where is it under calibrated?
- What information sharing could happen outside of meetings?
- In your one-on-ones, where does most of the time go? Where would you like it to go?
- Which domain gets skipped most often, and what would it take to protect time for it?