Being a good manager means meeting with your subordinates and hearing their thoughts and ideas. It’s about guiding them professionally and personally and helping to create a good working environment and experience that encourages innovation and quality. Essentially, it’s about being present, identifying problems that exist in processes that are taking place, and celebrating triumphs.

Cadence of these meetings can vary – depending on the type of work, and especially workload. But, an hour or longer with an employee can help improve work efficiency and will also improve how work is completed within the department. Communication can make a huge difference in being perceived as a good leader or as a frustrating manager.

Getting Started

The first 1-1 meeting is about identifying potential areas of growth – both organizationally and individually – and building a report. There are eight main topics to address in an initial meeting: Creating Report, Establishing Goals, Growth and Development, Giving and Receiving Feedback, Organizational Improvements, Departmental Improvements, Job Expectations, and Personal Growth.

The meeting should end by establishing action items for both the manager and the subordinate. That way the second 1-1 meeting can easily pick up where the other left off. Below are 10 questions to ask to get a conversations started:

What We Learned:

1. How are you? How is life outside of work? This is a really simple ice breaker and allows you to connect with your employee at a more personal level. It gets the conversation moving, and will allow you to understand an employee’s state of mind and anything outside of the workplace that might be affecting the work they are doing.
2. What do you want to be doing in 5 years? 10 years? 3 years? This question gives you an idea of the aspirations of an employee while also identifying interests and areas where you can help coach them to achieve their goals. It will ultimately encourage an employee to invest more effort into their work, as they begin to see results from your coaching and feel they are progressing toward their goals.
3. Who in the company would you like to learn from? What do you want to learn? An early action item can come from this line of questioning, setting up an employee with someone else in the organization to become more invested in the work being done at the organization as a whole, while also identifying a skill they would like to develop.
4. Do you feel you’re getting enough feedback? Why/why not? This can be a really helpful question for a manager, because it indicates how you are doing as a manager. Do they feel there has been enough communication within the department? Do they feel heard? Do they feel like their work is being valued?
5. What could I do as a manager to make your work easier? Identify areas in the organization that are not working as smoothly as they ought to be, and improve processes to improve production.
6. If you were CEO, what’s the first thing you’d change? Gets people thinking about things at the larger level, while also identifying an area that could be improved organizationally.
7. Do you feel over-worked, under-worked, or just the right workload? Establish whether or not, as a manager, you need to shift the work your subordinates are doing based on productivity and look for areas to prevent burnout. Is one employee doing most of the work? How can you shift that more evenly so that quality work is being done by all employees?
8. What do you feel is your greatest accomplishment here? Get a feel for the type of work your employee enjoys doing and what they view as success. This will help to establish what action items and achievable goals you can set up for an employee to make them feel empowered and invested in the organization.
9. What skills would you like to work on? Cut through the niceties to the real heart of the matter – what could you learn that would make your job easier and the quality of work improve? Provide resources based on this answer. Additional education or tools as required which will ultimately improve the pace and quality of work being completed.
10. What can you do to take action or make progress on what we talked about today? / What can I do to take action or make progress on what we talked about today? A great question for establishing action items moving forward. Walk away with a set goal for both yourself and your employee and use that as the objective in between 1-1 meetings. Reach that goal and discuss it in the follow-up.

Once you’ve established this baseline for communication, you can explore different areas in further detail in future 1-1 meetings. If personal growth was very important, set goals in the next meeting around further education and use the time as an opportunity to lead and answer questions. If creating better processes for completing work was important, outline new ideas and products for streamlining those processes and get their feedback. Let their interests guide future conversations.