Week In, Week Out

One-to-one meetings form the core of the relationship you have with your staff. They are the point during each week in which you both give up your time to be together. High-quality one-to-one meetings build high-quality relationships. They allow you to engage with your staff on a deep, personal level. By performing them mindfully and to a high standard, you can have a tremendous impact on the performance of your staff, and even on their lives. If you manage people for long enough, your one-to-ones will cover pretty much everything, from good times to bad, to conversations with highly performing staff to those who need to leave the company, to news of births and deaths, both of real people and of JavaScript frameworks. They really are life’s rich pageant.

Let me use a buzzword for a second: leverage. When we talk about leverage in a business context, we often mean doing highly impactful activities where a small investment of time and effort can result in large amounts of output. If you look back at the epigraph on the first page of this chapter, you’ll see it’s a quote from the Greek mathematician Archimedes, and indeed, with a large enough lever you could move the world. As a manager, you’ll be looking to find those opportunities to exert large amounts of leverage, and you’re in luck: your weekly one-to-ones with your staff are one of the best places for that to happen.

You’ll want to do one-to-ones with each of your staff every week. Yes, every week, without fail. A steady cadence and regularity are key for these meetings. It brings predictability into your relationship, demonstrating that you’re there for your staff week in, week out.

But first, let’s get prepared.

Leverage

Seeing as you work through other people as a manager, you should be keeping the Archimedes quote at the beginning of the chapter in mind. Where are situations where a small amount of your effort can have a disproportionately large outcome? These are the areas in which you should be focusing. For example, that difficult conversation, once had, could completely change the direction of an individual’s performance, making the team happier rather than others having to pick up the slack. Additionally, if you can master delegation, then you can have a whole team effectively doing your work, which is greater leverage than trying to code faster and more efficiently yourself. Think of situations where you can use the idea of leverage to best spend your time creating the biggest possible output. Where are they? Why are you not doing that activity already? Is there a difficult conversation that you’re putting off?