Who Owns the 1:1? Redefining This Key Leadership Tool

Advice for Engineering Managers and Software Engineers.

The 1:1 meeting is your most powerful tool as a leader. Even if you’re a Software Engineer looking to build influence, meeting with people directly is a great way to build trust and expand your network of people who actually know who you are and what you care about.

When we meet with people, it’s all about the value we bring. Today I’m going to focus on the manager to direct report 1:1, because oh boy do I have some opinions about this topic!

Who’s Meeting Is It?

This was surprising for me to learn, but the 1:1 belongs to the direct report!

As a Software Engineer, I met with my manager because my manager said that’s what we were going to do every week. It wasn’t explained to me why, and I just sort of assumed it was to give a weekly status report, so that’s what I did.

Every week, status report.

This is what I worked on, this is what I didn’t work on, this is what I am planning to work on.

Over and over. It felt like a huge waste of my time, and honestly I wasn’t sure why my manager wanted these meetings. You could just look at my github or Jira to see what I was doing, did you really need me to tell you the same information week after week?

Well eventually I learned that the meeting was for ME. It was supposed to be my time!

And I also learned that my managers job was the SERVE ME. His job wasn’t to make sure I was working. His job was to help me be better. To elevate my game. Help me grow. Unblock me. Get me breakfast!

Well not breakfast, but the rest is true.

Once I learned this, it changed everything.

Who Runs the Agenda

Since the direct report owns the meeting, they run the agenda.

If the manager has things they want to say or bring up, that’s possible, but the primary purpose of the meeting is to make it easy for the direct report to get access to the manager. To ask hard questions. To share context and gain context.

You don’t know how RSU’s (Restricted Stock Units) work? Ask your manager.

You want to get promoted? Talk to your manager. Grill them. Find out what your missing. Do you need a mindset shift? Bigger projects under your belt?

The 1:1 is your space to connect with the rest of the business, to understand how you can deliver value, to build a rapport with someone who may one day have to advocate on your behalf to leadership.

Oh you’re suddenly going to be a parent, you’re freaking out, ahhh! Talk to your manager. When I became a dad many years ago, I learned that Yelp covered 8 weeks full pay! I had no idea, but I asked, and then I did.

Advice on Running the Agenda

The single most effective method I have developed to having great 1:1s is to have a written down agenda each week.

This feels heavy and a lot of work if it’s not the norm, but trust me that it’s easy and saves you a lot of time. It also just works super well.

In practice this can be a fresh sheet of paper that sits on your desk each week, or in my case it’s a Google Doc. I like to share it with my manager so they can read ahead if needed, but I don’t think this is required.

During the course of the week, add your thoughts to the doc. These can be raw unfiltered thoughts, or they can be more thoughtful questions. I am reviewing my manager levels, so whenever I make time to work on them, I write down some of my thoughts. Some of them are questions I have for my manager, and some of it is context I would like to share with them.

If someone brings up something in one of my 1:1s that require my managers attention, I’ll pop over and make that not in the middle of the 1:1 (I let my report know I’m doing this so I don’t appear distracted).

This helps me from needing to remember things.

I’ve been to two many 1:1s with my manager where I went “I know on Tuesday I had something I wanted to talk to you about…but it’s Thursday now and my mind is an empty vessel, maybe I’ll remember”.

I didn’t.

This practice of taking notes over time means I can just roll into 1:1s with my manager and I have a lot to talk about. The week is busy, I don’t always want to take 15 intentional minutes to sit down before we meet to prepare some topics. No, I do this whenever a topic comes to mind.

I might include interesting articles I read for us to chat about, or insights from a meeting.

How to Help Engineers

Okay if you are a manager and you’re thinking “this is great, but how do I help my engineers have better 1:1s with me! They aren’t going to read this long article”.

I suppose if they are willing to read an article just send them the link, but otherwise here is what I do.

When I first meet my engineers, I share with them my managing philosophy. This includes the views I expressed here about 1:1s. “These are your meetings. I may bring topics to them, but I expect you each week to have your topics. Whatever you want to talk about. We can spend the entire time talking about your cat, or your projects, or your career, or ideas you have, it’s up to you. It can be valuable or it can be a waste of time, but it’s yours”.

It may not be a big rant like that, but you get the idea. I set expectations.

And then after 3 months or will refresh. I will remind them that this is their meeting. This is especially true for folks who I find are just giving me status reports each week. The nudge/reminder is generally pretty helpful to get them back on track.

And don’t push how they run the meeting. You can offer suggestions like a shared doc, but leave it up to them. You can keep your own doc for the engineer if you want (I have a private Notion page for everyone that links to various other databases, but we won’t cover that today). If they want a shared doc, great. If they don’t, that’s just as good.

As their manager, go with their flow. It’s easier for you if everyone does what works best for you, but being a manager is about helping your team, not pushing them into practices that don’t work for them.

Mini Question Bank

I am building a massive question bank as a PDF resource for my course for new and aspiring engineering managers, but here are some off the top of my head.

• How does compensation work? How do I make more money here?

• Am I ready for a promotion? If not, how do we get me there? If so, what can I do to help get that going? What is the promotion process here?

• I am unhappy with my job, help me fix that.

• Who do I talk to about X?

• Y thing made me feel uncomfortable, help.

• I am having trouble communicating with someone, how can I do better here?

• I am struggling with <this> aspect of my job, who would be a good mentor to help me grow here?

• Could we pair program on Z thing?

• I’m interested in becoming a tech lead / interviewer / manager /etc one day, how do I do that? Am I close?

• Recently you said we are doing <project>, but I don’t see how that’s a good use of our time, can we talk about that?

• I’m thinking about interviewing at other companies and wanted to give you a heads up. I’m not necessarily planning to leave, but I am considering it.

• I received offer X from a company. They said I have 2 days to respond, could you help me review the offer? How does it compare to my current compensation at our company?

• I am thinking of joining a startup / mid level / big co, how do they compare to our company? What would be different or similar?

Outro

And that’s it. I hope that was helpful and that you will now have more effective 1:1s. I have not worked on the 1:1 section of my upcoming course for new/aspiring managers yet, but I’m sure that will spur future articles on the topic for this substack. If you have questions feel free to comment or reach out to me on LinkedIn.

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Hey there good looking, you made it to the end! The article is over, but in this section I’ll share more about myself, the newsletter, and the state of the world.

The Course

First up, the course I’m working on to transform you into a confident engineering leader! It’s meant for new and aspiring managers to help them transform from “I have no idea what I am doing…” to “I can figure it out now!”

When we last spoke on Jan 21st we were at 3,800 words for the main content only, and today I breezed past 8,000. I’ve done a ton of research and editing, and I’ve found a flow that works really well for me!

When I make time to work on the course (in the evenings after the kids are in bed), I pick a module and work on its outline. What am I trying to say here? What is important to get across?

Usually this necessitates some research which could be reading books, reading articles, going back and fourth with an LLM, watching videos, etc. I actually learn a lot from this, and sometimes I will stop working on that section to let my subconscious process the new information and switch to something else.

Done is better than perfect, but I also want to make sure the quality of information is top notch. I am not going to heavily edit the videos and add lots of fun animations, for that aspect I could tinker forever, but for the content, the good stuff, I want that to be top notch.

When the research is done and the outline is solid, I’ve broken it up into a bunch of bite sized chunks with the main “what I want to say”, I then use speech-to-text combined with typing on a keyboard to get the rest down.

I estimate that the course will be around 20,000 to 30,000 words when it’s done! Let’s see how accurate that is. To put that in perspective, I looked up business books, and they are roughly 50,000 to 80,000, so that’s pretty cool! I have no intention of turning this into a book, I think there are pretty good books on how to become a manager, but we’ll see! Some people like to learn via books, some like to learn by course. I am focusing on the course crowd for now!

The Newsletter

I started a LinkedIn newsletter called “Lead Kindly Bites”. The mission is “value in under a minute” for the same topics as we cover in this substack newsletter. The next one will include some gems from this article.

The plan in general is to write my substack newsletter (like this one!), and then pull out the most interesting and valuable piece to share in the LinkedIn Bites version. This fits the LinkedIn audience a bit more who are looking for quick value, but I will also link to this substack for anyone interested in reading/learning more.

Why? One I think it would be useful, but I also want to grow this substack more. Today I have 3,700 followers on LinkedIn, which is 37x more than this substack! LinkedIn followers are a lot more casual than substack subscribers, so that’s fine, but I think a lot of those folks would enjoy this newsletter.

To help route them here, I am going to deliver value on their platform (Lead Kindly Bites) and give them an optional call to action to checkout a more detailed version of the bite they just read. We’ll see if that works! :)

I will also drive folks who found my substack back to LinkedIn. That could be you! Did you know I’m active on LinkedIn? Dropping wisdom bombs on my followers? I post between 3-5 times a week there, but because of how LinkedIn works, your unlikely to see all the posts I make. This is why I will always love substack more. You get every email I post here! It’s completely up to you to engage or not on your own time.