👷Deconstructing the 1:1 - How to have effective 1:1 meetings with your manager

Understand the importance of the relationship with your manager. Learn how to tailor your meeting depending on the role and personality of your manager.

There’s something most of us have in common: We all have a manager and 1:1 meetings(pronounced “one-on-one” or “one-to-one”).

We also can read, write, and talk, but that doesn’t mean we are good communicators. The same happens with 1:1s.

Of all the people who can hate you in their hearts, your manager shouldn’t be one of them. With others, you can minimize interactions. With your manager, you have to cultivate that relationship.

🏆 Takeaways

1. How to structure a 1:1 meeting with the PPP framework

2. How to tailor your 1:1 to each different context.

🫅 Why your manager is important

Your manager plays different roles. As your boss, you want to give visibility and create a positive impression. As your mentor, your manager can make you realize your strengths and new approaches to handling situations.

As a connector, your manager can find you a mentor or tell you the stories of the engineers who shaped the company. They can also provide you with the big-picture vision you don’t see in your role.

As a decision-maker, you can influence decisions by influencing your manager. Leverage your manager to resolve conflicts with other teams. I’d only add to be careful if the conflict is with a peer in your team. Use the Situation-Behavior-Impact framework to avoid seeming overly agitated.

To progress to the next level, writing a promo package is a shared effort between your manager and you. Ideally, they have less than 10 direct reports and worked with you for at least 1 year.

And this is not only about the result of a promotion, but about the growth process. A manager plays a catalyst role in your career. They speed the reaction between your talent and the company goals. They also minimize the friction between the two.

💬 How to cultivate good communication

We all have different communication styles. Make an effort to understand what makes your manager grumpy, what kind of status reports are good, if they prefer better written or verbal…

And make sure to communicate yours. A big thing is respecting your maker’s schedule: I’m an early bird. I work better in the mornings. If you put me in a meeting at 9.30 am, I won’t perform my best work that day. I also like respecting the lunch break to avoid rushing my lunch or missing the chance to play a ping pong match in the office 🏓.

Adopt the principle of no surprises by setting the right expectations. When onboarding, ask for a 30-60-90 day plan of expectations. Once onboarded, ask and log the expectations for the next review cycle. Even better, bring your understanding of the expectations and find where your understanding was wrong.

This is all about planning right to left (setting expectations and working backward) instead of left to right (you do some action and hope to get some positive result). Creating this working backward plan for your career and asking for feedback regularly is constantly adjusting your direction to avoid detours.

Another common situation is thinking your manager is not providing you with opportunities. That’s because they don’t know your goals (and probably neither do you).

Your early career goals will be technical. Your manager may want to offload a senior engineer and influence them to delegate and sponsor you with a project. Your late career will be about working with people. The opportunity may be putting you to lead an effort that spans multiple teams.

🫀Anatomy of a 1:1

Despite differences in communication styles, I consider an anti-pattern degrading the 1:1 into a status report meeting. Most information can be obtained from systems instead of people. It’s great to bring a status report, ideally written. Get over it in a couple of minutes. The same with problems and complicated situations: Get the benefits of venting for 5 minutes, but don’t dedicate 30 minutes to it. What you focus on, expands. Focus your 1:1 on your growth and not the past.

While researching this post, I found the concept of PPP (Progress, Plans, Problems). It’s like the typical standup update: “What I did yesterday, what I’m doing today, blockers”. But in PPPs don’t bring too many details, talk about career growth. For example, don’t talk about your plans on executing your task in the sprint, but your plans on contributing documentation for the library you are using for the task.

All my career I have kept my private notes in which I write the topics to cover in 1:1s. Now I see a lost opportunity to give more visibility. Instead of talking about them, I can write them in a shared document. It will be easier to remember or reference.

You can also take notes in that shared doc. Make sure for any idea your manager gave or plan in this week’s doc, you bring in the next 1:1 what progress you made. It’s not about completing it all. It’s about giving visibility to you taking action. The people who fail to communicate their actions give the impression that they don’t care. It sounds unfair, like many things in life. Use it to your advantage to create a positive halo effect around you. Become the direct report every manager loves.

Besides things you identified in your PPP, there are topics you are just exploring. Prepare those topics to discuss in the meeting. It’s fine if you don’t cover all, you can have a backlog of topics for the next one.

I try to cluster these topics and do themed 1:1s. Instead of randomly jumping from one topic to another, bringing multiple discussion points around the same topic creates deeper conversations.

🤷‍♂️ No one-size-fits-all approach

I approach 1:1s differently with my direct manager than with someone not in your everyday standup, like a skip-level manager. With your direct manager, the 1:1 is more recurrent and you share common meetings. Ask for explicit feedback and bring concrete examples, everything is recent in this situation.

With someone you don’t share that much and have more distant 1:1s, my approach would be different. My best 1:1 is a 30-minute meeting every 3 weeks. This is the edge in which I feel I have more topics to cover than time. I am forced to prioritize. It’s also a recurrence that makes none of us want to cancel and spend 6 weeks without contact. If there is a conflict we move it rather than canceling.

Here the PPP is about making yourself visible. This person is not in your team and doesn’t know what you are achieving. Rather than concrete examples, go for the big picture and validate the direction in which you are moving your career.

👽 Embrace differences

A big simplification is classifying people as mechanic or organic. if you have read until this point, you see how I am heavily mechanic putting structure to the meeting. For a long time, I have thought this is the right way. I will still argue that some structure and intention are important to have a healthy 1:1.

But now I see the human factor is critical. Throw away your plan if you or your manager are having a hard time and what you need is human interaction, not a list of bullet points. A quick catchup in these moments can be very beneficial to cultivate the relationship. I read recently this great post from

Raviraj Achar

, who argues the importance of face time to build the connection.

There once lived a scorpion and a frog. The frog carried the scorpion to cross the lake. Despite her initial hesitation, the scorpion’s logic was sound: Stinging the frog in the middle of the lake meant both would die.

Nevertheless, just as they reached the middle of the lake, the scorpion stung the frog.

The dying frog asked the scorpion: “Why did you sting me? It wasn’t in your best interest, now you are going to drown.”

The drowning scorpion answered: “I know. But I’m a scorpion. I have to sting you. It’s my nature.”

Humans are irrational creatures and logic doesn’t work well with us. We all have our unique nature. Instead of trying to change people into a standardized personality, enhance what they bring to the table.

💎 Understand your manager’s incentives

Engineering managers were usually engineers before. They went from pushing code and having clear artifacts to being in meetings and ending the day feeling they accomplished nothing.

Your manager’s performance is on projects delivered. If they ask for updates in a micromanaging way, it’s a signal you are not providing the right visibility or you don’t have a plan that to secure a successful delivery. You may be under-communicating (very little information) or over-communicating (too many technical details). Focus on the status report your manager needs

Your manager also has to write performance reviews, lay off people, join many 1:1s, deal with other teams… too many problems. You have an opportunity to get support on any idea if it solves a problem for your manager.

I wanted to make progress in the “mentoring others” part of my career and our previous intern got a return offer and joined soon. I offered to update the onboarding plan and be the onboarding buddy. Imagine my manager’s point of view: It’s one problem less. There’s no way my manager would decide to deny the request and now deal with finding someone to do this work.

🎯 Create a strategy for your next 1:1

If you want this post to impact your career, take action:

1️⃣ Draft a template for 1:1s in the PPP format and fill it in for the next meeting. Start a shared doc if you don’t have one with no expectation of your manager to do extra work of writing. You drive it.

2️⃣ Create a reminder to ask questions about your manager’s problems. Don’t use the 1:1 just to take from the relationship, take time to listen. The most interesting person is the person interested in hearing you.

3️⃣ And give it time. A good relationship is not built in a single 30-minute meeting. Every 1:1 you deposit money in that relationship’s bank account. It’s growing over time.

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Thanks for reading until the end. Hope to see you here next week
— Fran

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