Handing Vents and Making 11s Productive

This resource first appeared in issue #79 on 18 Jun 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones, Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals, Becoming A Manager: Other

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 — ask
• Don’t take a stance (you’re only hearing one side of things), but don’t be afraid to have opinions
• Try to end on a positive note
• See if you need to follow-up

In particular sometimes just letting something out is enough - but sometimes it’s raising something that needs to be addressed in future discussions.

In Longworth’s article, she talks about her formula for one-on-ones:

• Her first question is always “What’s the most important thing we talk about today?”
• After having the team member lead the discussion for a while, she addresses follow ups from previous meetings/things that came up this week.
• Asks about the team member’s wins for week, and worries
• Gives any org updates - this can be really tricky to do in one-on-ones and in my opinion is best handled in staff meetings
• Any time at the end gets filled with Weird Manager Questions; she asks if she can ask a weird manager question and then asks one of these:
  • Think about how you spend your time at work. Divide this sticky note/whiteboard square/drawing doc into the different things you do. Are these the right amounts of time you should/want to be spending on each of these? What would an ideal distribution of your time look like?”
  • “What ways can we show you we appreciate what you do?”
  • “Using Paloma Medina’s BICEPS framework, how are you doing across each of your core needs?” I like to use a scale model and track this over time. You can use something like “On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is ‘I feel awful’ and 5 is ‘happy as a clam,’ where are you on Belonging?” or something more tactile like “Here’s an empty battery outline - how ‘full’ or ‘empty’ are you feeling on Predictability?”

The last article is an old one but includes elements of both Kim and Longworth’s articles. In particular, Lopp considers a one-on-one that is just “an update” to be a bit of a miss, and shares his own approach for dealing with those - bringing up three particular points, doing a mini performance review on some specific area, or taking the time to get input on some fire he’s fighting. For the vent or the disaster Lopp gives similar advice to Kim - and suggests that one purpose of one-on-ones is to provide an environment where some of those minor dissatisfactions can be surfaced before they become vents or disasters.