One-on-one catchups with your team

Of all the things you can do for your team, the one-on-one catchup is the most important. Bin all your other meetings, but keep these ones!

In this article, I’ll cover why we do catchups, present a template for running your own catchups with some sample questions, and give some practical advice around when, where and how to run them. Finally, I’ve shared some real-life examples of catchups I’ve had.

Goals

The primary goal of a catchup is to build and strengthen individual relationships with your reports. Let that goal filter everything that you do in the catchup. A person’s experience of their work is highly influenced by the relationship they have with their manager, and here is your 30 minute slice of time to work on exactly that.

A strong relationship will let your reports approach you when something is wrong, with the knowledge that you’ll guide them fairly. This alone can be the difference between a highly-functioning business and a resentful, low-performance, uncommunicative business.

Other goals are to allow your reports to be heard and for you to take action if you can help them, and to provide them with feedback so they can celebrate and improve.

Catchups are not to discuss work in progress. If you’re running a tech team with an agile process, you’ll have planning sessions, standups and retrospectives where work is discussed with the rest of the team. Otherwise, you’ll hopefully have regular team meetings where progress is discussed (and if you don’t, there’s another thing to think about!)

Your report may start talking about their work in progress—after all, that’s what’s on their mind—but your job is to listen and then gently wrap up that conversation. If they really want to talk about it further, book a separate meeting for them.

A framework for catchups

I’d like to present to you a guide for constructing your own catchups. No two catchups will ever be the same, and since your overarching goal is to build and strengthen a relationship with your report, you should be prepared to throw the script away and focus on an individual issue for the entire catchup if that’s what is required.

Here are five parts that make up a good catchup. The order below is not strict, but it’s the order I usually end up using.

1. Emotional state
2. Relationships (peers, team, management)
3. Feedback (ask for and provide)
4. Goals (review and setting)
5. Wrap up

Let’s go through each one by one.

Part 1: Emotional state

My first question is always the same:

How are things going?

Our programmed response is initially to answer “fine”, but when you repeat and reword the question a few times, people get the idea that you’re really interested in how they’re going. Your task here is to understand what kind of weeks your report has had recently, and by focusing on how they’ve felt.

I know some people might feel uncomfortable about this, especially men who follow traditional communication patterns. Reality is that without discussing the emotional component, you’ll frequently miss the root problems.

Spend a couple of minutes exploring how the last weeks have been, what was exciting, what was frustrating, what was engaging, what was boring. If they bring up something, go deep into the subject. If they’re hesitant at any stage, give them plenty of time to compose their thoughts; don’t try to second guess them.

Silence can be uncomfortable, but it’s sometimes required. Take a pause, let them gather their confidence.

Here’s another question I almost always ask:

What are you worried/concerned about?

It frequently gets an insightful answer I would not have otherwise known about. Asking the right question is important.

Part 2: Relationships

Now it’s time to explore the report’s work relationships.

How do you think (team mate) is going?
How are you finding working with (team mate)?
What do you think (team mate)’s challenges are at the moment?
How’s your team going?
What’s your team struggling with?
How’s your working relationship with (other team)?

Most of our days are spent interacting with our peers, and that can make the difference between an enjoyable work experience and a miserable one.

Part 3a: Asking for feedback

Getting honest feedback from your reports is critical to running a good team. The majority of the tweaks to process and culture come from this direct feedback, and in most cases, people are too shy to offer it without prompting.

Here are a few questions to get you started drawing out your reports’ thoughts:

How can I help you better?
How can I support your work?
How can I make your job easier?
How do you think I could do my job better?
How can we do better as a company?
How can we be more excellent?

Choose one personal feedback question and one company feedback question per catchup, and dive down from there.

You may not be used to receiving personal feedback from your reports, and they almost certainly won’t be used to providing it to their manager, so don’t be surprised if the answer is “I can’t think of anything at the moment.” They might also be reticent to say something negative, feeling that it might be career limiting.

Give them time to have a good think, a bit of light pressure, and explain why it’s important for them to give you feedback. On the third or fourth catchup when you ask the question, and you’ve built up some trust, you might get a response!

Part 3b: Providing feedback

Time to provide feedback. Because you want your annual performance reviews to contain zero surprises, you should be doing mini performance reviews every single catchup. Yes, that means you need to prepare!

In my experience, there is never a good reason to withhold feedback. If someone is doing badly, or could be doing better, they need to know it as soon as practicable. This is important not only so they can try and improve, but also in the case of performance management, so you have a documented record of having discussed their performance early and frequently.

Here are some ideas for feedback:

• Tell them what you’re grateful for. They may have done a good job on a project, or demonstrated leadership, or participated in a voluntary activity, or just been supportive of one of their peers. Let them know you saw it and you appreciate it.
• Tell them what they could have handled differently. Identify what they did, then suggest and discuss alternatives. This way they have a path to learn from their mistakes. You might want to set an exercise that puts them in the same situation again, so they can practise the alternative action.
• Give them feedback that their team has provided about them (with their team’s approval.) You’ll get this material from other catchups.

You may have heard a technique affectionally called the “shit sandwich”, which is a compliment, followed by a piece of critical feedback, followed by another compliment. Please don’t do this. Not only is it insultingly obvious and contrived to most people, it misses the point. I prefer the concept of the emotional bank account.

With every new person, you start with a zero balance. When you support them and give them positive feedback, you make a deposit to your account with them. Negative feedback is a withdrawal, but as long as your account is in credit, that withdrawal doesn’t hurt the relationship. Try to withdraw without sufficient funds, though, and you’re in trouble.

Part 4a: Review goals

In your last catchup, you will have set some short- and long-term goals. You will have also taken a note of these, so flip back to last session and review the progress of these goals.

Yes, sometimes your report will not have achieved their goals. Some light pressure, an explanation of why the goal is important, and devising a system with the report to ensure they’ll remember for next time usually fixes this.

Part 4b: Set goals

Fortnightly goals are great to keep your team improving and engaged. These goals probably won’t be directly related to their job description (for example, it’s unlikely you’ll give a software developer a goal of improving their dev skills, unless maybe they were in the first year of their career.)

Think instead about goals which will progress their career, increase their value to your company, and make them more employable in their future.

I’ve set short-term goals on leadership, influence, improving delivery process, attendance, speaking volume, presentation style, community activities, open source contributions, confidence building, relationship building, empathy, introspection, and even typing speed.

This is also a good time to take a peek at your report’s annual performance objective goals, breaking them down into small components so that they have the best chance of success.

Log their goals in your notes, and make sure they have a record of them too. I often send a message to remind them what we agreed upon.

Part 5: Wrap up

You’re almost there. I have two questions I use at the end of every catchup.

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask me about the business?
What else would you like to talk about?

Leave a good chunk of time for this, because I’ve found that asking these questions can often lead to a 10-minute discussion. Better end early rather than ask these 3 minutes before your next meeting.

The basics: when, where, and how

When: I’ve found half-hour catchups once a fortnight work best. Catchups are not something you want to miss, because you’ll find once you start them, your reports will value them highly. Reschedule as soon as possible if you can’t make one.

I put most of my catchups on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but you may prefer them spread across the week. I always leave 15 minutes after each catchup, in case they run over time.

Where: Choose a private, comfortable space for your catchups. Your reports will sometimes want to discuss subjects that are personal to them, and you need to provide an environment that they’ll feel safe in doing so.

If it’s a nice day, a catchup can be a great opportunity to head out for a walk, but I’d suggest only doing this once a good relationship has already been built. It’s hard to see people’s facial expressions when you’re walking, which is important data.

How: Prepare for your catchup. Read the notes from your previous session with them, and think about the feedback you’d like to offer them today.

Finally, take notes from your catchup. You’re busy, and things can fall out of your head pretty quickly. Post catchup, transfer the actions you need to do to whatever you use as your task list (I use Trello and love it.)

Real-world examples

Here are a few examples I’ve taken from my experience as a manager who does catchups.

Unsatisfied with work

One of my reports was struggling with their performance; they were very slow at their work, frequently over-thinking or over-engineering it. Through a long series of catchups, we investigated what motivated them, picking out the parts of the work that they excelled at. We then created a new role around these competencies, which made them a lot happier in the work, and a lot more productive for our company.

Imposter syndrome

One of my reports had quite a bad case of “imposter syndrome”—the idea that they were surrounded by brilliant people and they didn’t deserve to be there. They used a lot of negative language about themselves, sometimes in the context of humour, but frequently only half joking. This significantly impacted their work and the way their teammates interacted with them.

As part of the catchups, we discussed their impression of themselves, and made a goal to reduce negative self-language. We also explored how other people handled imposter syndrome. It took around a year, but I saw a huge change which made them happier and a lot more effective in their work.

Not the right place

Another report was having performance issues, and we worked through various strategies for improving performance and giving them work that was best suited to their skillset. In the end, however, we both came to the conclusion that the type of work we were doing just wasn’t in the report’s core competencies, and they’d be better suited to other work, and so we looked for other more suitable jobs. Instead of a messy, time consuming and stressful performance management process, the report left the company happy and positive, and we were able to hire someone better suited for the position.

Speech volume

Through a catchup, asking what concerns a report had in their team, I found out that they actively avoided working with one of their teammates because they couldn’t hear them speak. We surfaced the problem with the teammate and got in a speech coach to help people in our delivery team project their voices better.

I hope you enjoy doing catchups. It’s a part of my job that I really love, to share thoughts with the talented people I work with. I hope you’ll find that they engage your staff, putting them in greater alignment with your goals, and ultimately making your team and company a better place to work.