How To One-On-One

Some time ago I participated in a Demystifying Management workshop, lead by Lara Hogan. Being a software engineer with an interest in management – I found it both informative and with just the right amount of audience participation to drive the points home (and not feel like a chore). 

This post is my attempt at summarizing the workshop, if you do find the information below interesting – I recommend attending the workshop. It’s exceptional! 

While trying to remember everything that Lara said, I realized that my memory sucks tremendously. So I looked up additional information in Lara’s excellent book “Resilient Management”, as well as in a few other articles (sources are provided at the bottom of this post). 

Right, to get into the nitty-gritty details of different aspects of management – let’s split it up into manageable (heh) chunks: mentoring, coaching, sponsorship, 1:1s, dealing with human emotions and delivering feedback. Let’s dig in.

Mentoring

Ah yes, mentoring. What’s mentoring? It’s when a more senior or experienced person works with a junior or less experienced person to teach, encourage and ensure their success. While there aren’t any randomized controlled trials, the literature seems to suggest that mentored individuals are promoted earlier, are more likely to follow their initial career goals and have greater career satisfaction as opposed to people without mentors. 

For this to work, the mentee needs to have clear goals and the mentor should be someone who is at least a step ahead of where the mentee hopes to be professionally. It helps for the mentor to be approachable, available, enthusiastic and have good interpersonal skills. Easy, right? 

It’s also important for the mentor and mentee to have intersecting values. Differences in values can undermine a mentoring relationship. So an ideal successful mentoring relationship has an altruistic mentor with plenty of mentoring experience and an extensive professional network. 

Hogan’s book mentions that a successful mentoring relationship involves honesty, active listening, flexibility, reciprocity, mutual respect, a personal connection, and shared values. But honestly, any good relationship, mentoring or not, should. 

To really utilize the power of learning from others’ experiences, it would help for the mentee to develop multiple mentoring relationships over their careers. 

Some inconclusive research has been done on whether men are less effective career sponsors for women than female mentors, or not, when it comes to career advancement. However, same-gender role models may be more effective at providing advice and encouragement when it comes to work-life balance issues. 

For the first time meeting between a mentor and a mentee it would help to set aside an hour to get to know each other, and set ground rules; figure out a regular meeting time, talk about the commitment to confidentiality. This is also a good place to discuss what both sides expect to gain from and contribute to the relationship. Set a rough timeline for goals and priorities. Keep in mind that goals do need to be flexible, since priorities and opportunities will change with time. If that seems like a lot… I did say that the first meeting should be an hour long.  

This only works if both sides are making an effort. Mentees should demonstrate an eagerness to learn, an understanding of mentors’ schedules and to be flexible on availability. I’m a firm believer in respecting other people’s time, so it goes without saying that both sides should be prompt for their appointments. Adding structure to the meetings helps, so mentees coming prepared with lists of topics for discussion is a plus. As I’ve mentioned before – honesty is crucial for a good mentoring relationship, which means that mentees should be open to feedback and critique. Of course, it helps if feedback is delivered the right way, and I’ll talk about that a bit later.  

Mentors support the professional development of mentees. Mentors contribute to the personal development of mentees by helping them fit into the social working environment, establish work connections that may lead to future collaboration. Mentors can also protect a mentee from excessive demands and provide guidance in navigating internal politics. A good mentor will demonstrate confidence in a mentee, encourage them and provide frequent feedback. An effective mentor will balance support with challenge by providing opportunities and setting positive expectations. 

A mentor must respect the mentee and act responsibly, wrong advice could destroy a mentee’s career. Mentors should maintain cultural and gender sensitivity toward mentees, respect confidentiality and, finally, they should be generous with credit and never see their mentees as a threat. 

So, mentorship is a type of guidance that is provided by the mentor based on their own experience. It is more focused on providing advice than letting the employee work it out for themselves. So what else is out there? 

Coaching

In mentoring mode, the mentor focuses both on the problem and on the solution. You use your previous experience to suggest a solution that you’d go for in the mentee’s situation. 

Coaching, on the other hand, focuses on helping the person being coached to get to a solution on their own by asking open questions and reflecting. 

Asking open questions helps the other person dig deeper into the topic. 

Reflecting both makes sure that you understand what they’re saying correctly and helps establish that what they’re saying matches what they mean. 

Open questions are questions that cannot be answered with a yes or no answer, so think of questions starting with who/what/when/where/why/how. The open questions that work best are the ones that focus on the problem instead of the solution. Typically, why questions can come off as judgmental and how questions push into the solution part of the topic. 

Their answers give you a good starting place for coaching. It can give both of you more insight into what their goal really means to them, as well as give you more information on the things they’ve done to start moving towards it. It establishes a two-way conversation with the person and makes them feel heard. 

Some practice with the intonation of questions might sometimes be required to make those questions feel genuinely open and curious. 

Reflections also help the other person feel heard. To reflect – repeat back to them what you’re hearing them say. For example: 

“What I think you’re saying is that the pull request review process frustrates you”.

It doesn’t matter if you get the reflection right or not, it should still help the person realize something new about their topic. Reflection encourages the other person to use introspection, which gives them an opportunity to realize new aspects of the problem. 

How to start a reflection? How about you try this: “What I’m hearing is…”, “What I know about you is…”.

In a way, coaching is less stressful, as it doesn’t require you to have all the answers or fully understand the problem. You’re there to facilitate the person’s thinking process and help them come to conclusions on their own. 

Coaching can generate more growth for the other person by giving them an opportunity to come up with a solution by themselves than giving them advice or sharing your perspective. 

Sponsorship

Sponsorship usually happens in an environment when someone’s work can be recognized, and frequently the person you’re sponsoring is not around. You feel a responsibility to get someone you work with on to the next level and you go for it. When you hear of new opportunities that sync up with the aspirations of the person – you put your reputation on the line to volunteer them. It is, of course, important for them to know you’re doing this. 

Sponsoring is considered more effective at helping a person move up than mentoring or coaching.  

Studies show that someone having a sponsor means that they are more likely to have access to career-launching work, as well as more likely to take actions that lead to organizational growth and opportunities. 

The ways sponsorship can work are: 

• Through assigning tasks and projects that are just beyond the current skill of a person, so these will help them grow and prove to be good supporting evidence for a promotion;
• Giving visible recognition – thanking them in a company-wide email, giving their manager positive feedback about their work, having them present a demo;
• Providing them with the opportunity to write blog posts, deliver conference talks, contribute to open-source. 

It is worth mentioning that according to this article members of underrepresented groups are frequently under-sponsored and over-mentored. So, while they get a lot of advice, there’s not a lot of practical support. The reason for that is in-group bias. We are biased to surround ourselves with people who look like us and draw from this group of people when suggesting someone for promotions, projects, etc. Being aware of this bias, making a conscious effort against this bias a great way to fight it.  

1:1s

Okay, so keeping in mind all of the information about mentoring, sponsoring and coaching, let’s talk about one-on-ones. 

It’s a good idea to give the person roughly 5 minutes during the one on one to vent and just talk about anything they feel like talking about. 

For engineers above junior level, the recommended default approach is coaching, with occasional switches to mentoring when they are looking for a specific answer. 

It Is important to build relationships with the people you work with. It’s not unusual for one-on-ones to continue after you stop being a person’s manager. So, to build a relationship it might be a good idea to spend some time during the first meetings to get to know the person better. Some of the questions that are worth asking are: 

• What makes you grumpy? 
• How can I help you when you’re grumpy?
• How do you like to receive feedback and recognition?
• What are your goals for this year?

Some of them might sound silly, but you get a better understanding of what can make your person upset and how you can help. Finding out more about the things they like can help in the future, when you’d like to show your appreciation for them going above and beyond. Questions like these also help gauge what balance of mentoring, coaching, and sponsoring they need and help interact with them in a way that’s comfortable for them.

So what are 1:1s for? Or how many bullet-points can I fit in a section.

For the manager one-on-ones:

• allow to spread information (Context); 
• develop a relationship with their reports (Trust);
• identify the career trajectory (Growth); 
• get status updates and unblock them (Problem Solving). 

For the direct report one-on-ones are:

• a chance to hear news, rumors, change in strategy (Context);
• a way to see that their manager cares about their well-being (Trust);
• an opportunity to keep growing their skills (Growth);
• a means to get help to getting unblocked (Problem Solving).

A good balance of the above for one-on-ones is:

• Spending the first 5-10% of it on Context; 
• 80-90% on Trust, Growth and Problem Solving, as well as to share feedback;
• And the last 5-10% on Wrap-up. 

Depending on the report’s level of seniority the Trust-Growth-Problem Solving part can for the biggest part consist of Mentoring (for more Junior positions) or Coaching. But of course, this also depends on each individual case.

Dealing with Human Emotions

Even the most reasonable, logical human beings have emotions (shocking, I know). And they come into play when a person’s core needs are affected. These are the things that make a person feel comfortable, safe and secure. For an easy way to remember them, both Lara Hogan and (coach and trainer) Paloma Medina use the abbreviation – BICEPS. Let’s go through the letters. 

Belonging: this is about the sense of connection to a community. People are social animals, so social rejection is perceived by our brains as a threat. Of course, it’s different for every person, but some of the examples are: not being invited to a team retrospective; feeling left out of team conversations when people in the team switch to a different language.

Improvement/Progress: this is about making progress towards some sort of a purpose and can be related to progress within the organization, team, in personal life or all of the above. Not seeing growth or not feeling like there’s enough learning opportunities, not feeling productive at the end of the day can affect the person’s morale. 

Choice: this reflects the power to make autonomous decisions about work and life. The ability to be flexible in solutions instead of following concrete instructions to a T. There needs to be a good balance of choices that one can make though, too many and the person might feel overwhelmed, too few – and they might feel powerless. 

Equality/Fairness: the general gist is that everyone in the work environment has equal access to resources, information and support. The decisions made are both fair to everyone affected by them and are communicated in a fair manner. Lack of fairness or perceived lack of fairness can affect teams or companies in the most drastic ways. 

Predictability: just like with choice this core need requires finding a good middle-ground. Too much predictability might mean that the person isn’t getting challenged enough and works on repetitive or boring tasks. Not enough of it and it looks like goals are constantly shifting, career paths changing, the org gets frequently restructured. It can feel overwhelming. When the future and one’s place in it are too uncertain, people tend to become stressed. The right balance of predictability and the unexpected is key.

Significance: or status, is about the recognition of achievements, the place in the hierarchy. It’s a mind-blowing concept, but people tend to like it when their achievements are recognized. An alignment in the person’s understanding of their place in the company hierarchy and their actual place in the company hierarchy is important. Promotions, demotions, uninviting a person from important meetings all play into it. 

The level of importance of each individual core need differs per person. Awareness of them can help in two ways. First of all, we tend to project our own ideas of which core needs are most important on other people, and help them from our perspective, not theirs. And secondly, actually asking your person about which BICEPS are more important to them and catering to those is not considered cheating. 

Delivering (and Receiving) Feedback

Feedback is an important tool to help your teammates grow, it needs to be specific, it helps if it’s linked to the job role and it has to be clear and actionable for it to work well. It is really important to provide feedback regularly, both negative and positive. 

Despite the widespread idea that a feedback sandwich is a good thing – it really isn’t. It’s best to separate feedback, otherwise the positive can get overshadowed by the negative or feel disingenuous. Of course, people are different, but generally we do tend to linger on negative feedback more than on the positive, so another suggestion is to give roughly six positive feedbacks per one negative. 

Additionally, too much feedback can feel overwhelming and turn into noise and too little feedback can put a person in a state where they don’t know if they’re moving in the right direction, can’t adjust their behaviour in a timely manner or, if they’re anything like me, can get a serious case of impostor syndrome. 

Humans are not always great at receiving feedback and can go into defensive mode if they feel like they are being overly criticized or attacked. So, it is important to deliver the feedback in the right manner. The suggested equation for it is: 

Observation + Impact + Request or Question = Actionable Feedback

Observation: this is pretty straightforward, you share the facts of who did what, when and where. This is not the place to share your feelings about what happened, it’s a straight cut statement about your observation of a behavior. This is important. 

Impact: here you talk about how the observed behavior affected you, the project or the team. You can talk about your feelings here, but it’s generally a good idea to try and state an impact that is measurable. In some cases, of course, the impact can be more personal, and hard to measure; in these cases, it might help to try and dig deeper and figure out what the effect of a personal impact might be, look beyond surface-level feelings. It’s best to focus on a single effect and try to find one that resonates with their interests: the quality of their work, their reputation, promotion, etc.  

Request or question: in this part of the equation you get to pick between the mentoring or coaching approach. You could always go for the “this is what I saw, here’s how it affected the team, I’d like you to do this” approach, and it might work in the short term, but it would probably have less impact on the person. If you solve their problems for them – they never get an opportunity to come to the conclusion themselves, to empathize more with the people they work with and understand the surrounding environment and their effect on it better. Instead, get genuinely curious, put your coaching hat on and ask them a question. Avoid loaded or leading questions and try to genuinely understand their behavior. The chances are that the person will go into problem-solving mode and grow from this experience. 

Additionally, focus on what the person needs, don’t say “I need this” and instead of “you” use “I” or “we”.

This kind of feedback approach is useful to have not just between manager and employee, but also among the team. It would help to mentor and coach them explaining the feedback formula and talking about human emotions. In the end, the whole team will benefit from this knowledge. 

Conclusion

And that pretty much sums up the things Lara talked about during the workshop. A lot of them were eye-opening and Lara’s way of presenting the information to us was engaging and fun. I’m extremely glad that I’ve attended her workshop and I can’t stress enough that if you get an opportunity to see her live – you absolutely should. 

Sources

1. What does sponsorship look like? (https://larahogan.me/blog/what-sponsorship-looks-like/)
2. Sponsorship can start small (https://cate.blog/2017/03/21/sponsorship-can-start-small/)
3. The real benefit of finding a sponsor (https://hbr.org/2011/01/the-real-benefit-of-finding-a)
4. Balanced 1:1s (https://wherewithall.com/resources/Balanced-One-on-Ones.pdf)
5. Strategies for building an effective mentoring relationship (https://www.americanjournalofsurgery.com/article/S0002-9610(13)00413-3/pdf)
6. The Sponsor Dividend (https://www.talentinnovation.org/_private/assets/TheSponsorDividend_KeyFindingsCombined-CTI.pdf)
7. Women Are Over-Mentored (But Under-Sponsored) (https://hbr.org/2010/08/women-are-over-mentored-but-un)