Ideas for Successful One-on-Ones

I love doing one-on-ones with my team. It's an opportunity to listen to personal perspective on things that may not otherwise be shared in a group setting, and allows me to give individual feedback as needed. In short, one-on-ones are a great way to keep a pulse on your team's health. In terms of frequency, it helps to have one-on-ones once a week, since feedbacks are more effective when given in a timely manner. Take notes at your team's retrospectives because we often vote on the matters that are most important to the team, and deprioritize the ones without enough votes. This is your opportunity to hear those concerns that are important to the individual.

Ideas for one-on-ones:

• Celebrate the wins, even small ones. People need encouragements to know they are making an impact.
• Ask the person if they need any additional support. Sometimes people won't reveal that they need something unless you ask.
• Ask the person if any process improvements can be made about the team/project from their perspective. People love to have their ideas heard, and really great ideas can come out of these conversations.
• For new team members, I find it helpful to talk through the stories that are being worked on, and go into to describing the why's behind the stories. Junior developers have a tendency to dive into things before getting the bigger picture, and my job is to help them pull back a little before diving in too deep. Talking about specific stories will also generate questions that would then lead to architecture discussions, which are tremendously helpful for on-boarding new people.
• For a story gone wrong, I tend to do a tiny post mortem. Asking a lot of why's will help the developer generate ideas of better ways to do things in the future. It's better to guide your team to solve problems on their own rather than dictating how problems should be solved. It's not an easy balance to strike and I admit that sometimes I over index on the latter.
• If performance or morale is an issue, find out if there are personal issues the individual might be dealing with.
• Take quick surveys. Sometimes asking the person to say rate their stress-level on the scale of 1-10 can be a quick and easy way to gain insight into how someone's doing. More or less conversation can follow depending on the answer.
• Career planning discussions should happen periodically to see if the person is on track to achieving their goals. It helps to clarify the promotion process, and what they are being measured against.
• Talk about up coming vacations, or recent weekend outings. It can't all be about work.
• Bring up training opportunities to gauge interest and help the team expand their horizon.
• Give insight into organizational challenges. Sometimes projects stall due to dependencies, and it helps to talk through the issues and brainstorm together. Transparency can go a long way in managing expectations.

These are just some of the ideas I frequently use. Would love to hear yours.

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