Are you bored in your 1:1 meetings?

A few years ago, I was sitting in a 1:1 with Joe, a member of my team.?

To be really honest, I wasn’t looking forward to it. The truth is that it felt obligatory and boring.

Even?more?honestly, there have been times when, as a leader, I’ve just stopped doing these 1:1s altogether. I found them to be totally ineffective.

If you’ve been in my world for a while, you know how important I think it is to be effective with your time. I don’t participate in meetings that don’t actually produce, and I advise my clients to stop attending meetings where their presence isn’t deeply impactful.?

This was not that.?

My 1:1 meetings were shallow. We were stuck in that surface level conversation where we pretended the discussion was helpful. Still, behind it, we knew that the meeting could have been an email and neither of us could wait for it to end.?

From a strategic perspective, I could have implemented a new kind of meeting agenda, taken a course on how to lead more effective meetings, or eliminated the meetings entirely.?

Instead, I went deeper into the foundation and found a crack.?

The meetings were boring and ineffective because Joe was not growing. He was showing up week after week with the same questions, same issues and same roadblocks.?

When I asked him about his development, he had the same shallow answers.

And I was getting?impatient.?

Instead of diving deeper into his development and challenging the real issue, his lack of resilience and willingness to push past the initial discomfort was my excuse to let the meetings gradually fall off of our calendar.?

Have you experienced this? As a leader or?from?your leader?

This isn’t even the part that stung the most.?

The part that stung the most was that when I looked for the root cause of my impatience, I found immaturity.?

I used to quit because the development was getting hard.?

I quit when I saw he wasn’t growing.?

I quit when the development was no longer exciting and was, instead, slow and challenging.?

That was immaturity.?

This word tends to have shame attached to it. So let’s briefly remove it. The definition I am using for immaturity is “not fully developed.”

And if you read our email yesterday, you’ll remember that we offered a few questions for when you’ve hit a roadblock as a leader.?

“What is wanted here, what is needed here?”

This helps bypass the shame and sense of personal failure. When I asked that question what I found was that he needed me to help him develop his thinking.?

What I needed was to really see him grow, for that to happen, I need to identify the places where I was being impatient and immature.

Where is your life reflecting back to you some leadership immaturity?

Where is there more room for development?

And can you ask yourself what is wanted and needed without shaming yourself?

This is one of the primary skills we’re going to be teaching at?The Academy?in a few days.?

We have room for 2 more leaders in our intimate, 2 day event.?

Accountability without shame is called?learning.

And in these two days, we’re going to playfully dive deep into the places where our leadership is calling for more development.?

We’re going to look at all of it without shame.?

We’re going to laugh. We’re going to get honest and we’re going to grow exponentially as a result.?

Is one of the last two spots yours?

With love,

Mari Carmen

#professionaldevelopment #leadership #womeninbusiness