jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Becoming A Manager
Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other |
Building trust — with people and software - Tal Joffe Tal uses technical analogies to management-of-humans concepts. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good idea! but the basic concepts are important enough that it’s worth trying a lot of different approaches to reach different audiences. Here, he addresses one of the key goals of one-on-ones; building trust with direct reports. The analogy is between say testing your alignment and agreement on a number of topics in one-on-ones with running tests on code bases; in both...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Coaching | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
How to Coach Employees? Ask these One-on-One Meeting Questions - Claire Lew, KnowYourTeam The Ultimate 1-on-1 Meeting Questions Template - PeopleBox All of the above approaches require knowing your team members well - how well they’re doing what they do now, what they’d like to do next, and where they have untapped strengths. Regular one-on-ones, where the focus is on the team member and not on you or on status updates, are by far the best tool we have to learn these things and to...
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How to manage one to ones - Dan Moore, Letters to a New Developer I’ve shared several posts here about one-on-ones from our point of view as a manger; this one is written as advice to someone starting out as an initial contributor, focusing on what they should be aiming to get out of a one on one. Whichever side of the conversation you’re on, it’s worth spending some time thinking about what the other person should be aiming to get out of these conversations!...
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The Research Computing Teams One-on-one QuickStart Guide - Jonathan Dursi Here’s a short concrete plan to get started doing one-on-ones with your research computing team. For each weekday, there’s about 10 minutes of reading and another 10-15 minutes of homework to do to get you started doing one-on-ones with your team starting one week from when you begin. There’s follow-up activities in weeks two and three to take stock, make tweaks, and start thinking about tools that will help.
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14 questions to ask an underperforming employee during a one-on-one meeting - Clair Lew, Know Your Team Good question types to get to the root of why an employee isn’t performing well on some kinds of tasks. They come in two categories: Looking inward, to find: “How have I been letting this person down? How have I been getting in the way?” Looking outward, to find: “What on the employee’s end is limiting them? What choices or capabilities of their own are keeping them from...
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Meeting everyone on a new team - Anna Shipman Last time we talked about leaving a team, this time an article about doing one specific thing when joining a new team as a manager or director - speaking with every person in your new organization. Shipman describes having 30 minute meetings with each person in her new 50 person organization over the course of several months. Long time readers will recognize it as looking a bit like the first half of a weekly one-on-one; mostly...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Becoming A Manager: Delegation |
Help, I’m a Research Computing Manager! - Jonathan Dursi, SORSE event At the really nicely run SORSE event last week, I gave my 10 minute pitch that research computing actually prepares you pretty well for the advanced skills managing needs, we just need to shore up the basics. The basics I covered won’t be of a surprise to any readers - one-on-ones, feedback, delegation. The talk and the resources I recommended are on the page; also, I updated my one-on-ones quickstart guide (PDF, epub) that...
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Managers: What do you do when your teammate shares their grief? - Lara Hogan Hogan, taking lessons from her mothers pastoral care when she was going up, shares some humane steps you can take if someone unexpectedly shares grief with you over a significant tragedy in their lives. These steps are human for both the team member and you. The steps are: Have a handy, simple response ready - Hogan has a few to hand such as “Oh, I’m so sorry” or “That sounds incredibly...
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Private 1:1 Notes Template (Google Doc) - Don Neufeld One-on-ones are an incredibly useful tool for listening to your team members, and building up the trust so that they’ll actually tell you things. Over time you’ll learn a lot about your team members desired career development, and between those and setting and reviewing goals you’ll get good information about their strengths and gaps. Periodically reviewing those one-on-one notes and distilling them into some key “headline” areas - and keeping those headlines updated - is an...
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How to Run Effective 1:1s - Luca Rossi The big guide to One on Ones (1:1s) for Managers - Matt Nunogawa It’s always good to refresh the basics, especially when hearing from someone new. Rossi emphasizes, correctly in my opinion, the relationship-maintenance aspect of one-on-ones - maintaining the lines of communication is at least as important as what is communicated in any particular one-on-one. He also has this nice image about how having a scheduled opportunity to touch base frequently makes it much easier to...
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What if you dread 1:1s with a direct report? - Lara Hogan, LeadDev You’re not going to look forward to all one-on-ones equally. If there are some you find yourself dreading, that’s an indicator light that something needs looking at in the relationship, on your side or theirs. After digging into things to understand what’s bothering you about the meetings or relationship, figuring out what you need, and making clear to yourself what is and isn’t your responsibility, Hogan suggests working with your team member...
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When a 1:1 turns into a vent session - Yihwan Kim One-on-one 101 - Tiffany Longworth, Clickety The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster - Michael Lopp A couple good articles on one-on-ones from a a couple of weeks ago. In the first, Kim offers five pieces of advice around vents. In particular, vents aren’t about problem solving, they’re about letting something out - and that something has been festering for a while. So Kim’s advice is: Don’t rationalize, and definitely don’t interrupt Don’t assume...
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The Hotel Giraffe - Michael Lopp, Rands in Repose There’s a lot in here about stress, how it builds up, and how it’s hard to see sometimes from the inside. Lopp has four questions he asked his team members during a previous job: On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 == low, 10 == high): How stressed are you right NOW? What is your IDEAL stress level? Ideal meaning the stress is useful and not debilitating. What is your MAX stress level? What behaviours...
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How to Get Your Silent 1-on-1s Back on Track - Emmanuel Goossaert Whether it’s trust issues, or just overwhelm, one-on-ones can get quiet from time to time. For almost any other kind of meeting, if the meeting is short because there’s not much to say, that’s a win! But the purpose of one-on-ones is maintenance of a line of communication, more so than what is actually communicated in any given week. If that line of communication isn’t functioning, we as managers need to do the...
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Tech 1-on-1 ideas & scripts - Rob Whelan Here are some scripts or ideas for discussions for one-on-one meetings with team members, broken up into four categories of situations: Nothing from me - skip this one? Everything is (really) fine This is fine (on fire) Something has to change They’re short reads but useful for clarifying your thinking before going into one-on-ones; certainly for new managers and it’s always worth refreshing on the basics.
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