One of the most valuable things you can do as a manager is catch up with each team member regularly.
From catch-ups you get to learn more about the individual. How do they think, what do they even like thinking about? What’s their perspective of how the team is doing and the wider impacts they’re having on the business or our customers. Also, don’t forget - through catch ups you get to learn if you’re doing a good job as a manager. While I’ve found a relatively informal approach to catch ups helps in surfacing information that might not come up in a more formal setting, my team and I have come to an agenda (with help from the Internet) that helps carry the conversation and make sure we always touch on some regular points.
Side-note: If possible, in a post-Covid19 world, having the catch-up outside of the office perhaps over a hot drink, or on a ‘walk and talk’ is so important. Getting away from a working environment might help people share thoughts that they might otherwise not feel comfortable sharing in a work setting, even if you do have a meeting room to yourselves. With Zoom meetings perhaps making an effort to have the meeting outside or on your phones as you both go for a walk could be helpful.
An easy way to remember the agenda is through the five points:
- You
- Us
- Feedback
- Actions
- Wrap up
Below are some suggestions for talking points at each stage.
This is a time to check in with the person and how they’re feeling. It’s a point for them to share how things might be going at work (or at home) and how they might be progressing with their personal development initiatives, or an area of specific feedback. Direct questions or prompts for more information can help those who don’t share so easily. Questions like “how has the past couple of weeks gone for you?“; “what wins have you had recently?“; “what has been frustrating you or has got in the way of you working at your best?” can be helpful.
This is a point to check in with how the person thinks ‘WE’ are doing as a team. It’s a time to talk about their perspective of the team and any interactions they’ve had with other teams. This is a good point to get insights or their opinion on a new approach that the team might be trialing, ideas they might have on an existing project, or you could hear that they haven’t been working with other teams but they see an opportunity where this could happen.
This is also a time to ask for explicit feedback about the team. While the end goal is everyone shares their feedback with people directly, a manager is in a good position to be the messenger of feedback between people in a team. They might want to give a shout out to someone, or want to note that they think someone in the team has been having a hard time - something you can follow up on.
The third point is an explicit time for feedback. This is a point for you to give feedback to the person and for you to ask for feedback from them. It has to be a two-way. Regardless of if you have new feedback to share, it should always stay as an agenda point. If you haven’t been able to come up with new feedback, tell them that and start a conversation about what the person wants to receive feedback on. It might turn out that they need feedback from someone in a more specialist role. If so, help them start that conversation.
Keep this in the agenda and you’ll never hear from the team that they’re not getting enough feedback!
Throughout these conversations actions might surface that either of you could take. It could be related to a great idea that’s come from the conversation, or it could be more specific to the person sharing their development progress on a certain initiative. Now is a time to review previous actions (that you BOTH of course recorded!) and discuss any progress.
Wrap up is the final point, leaving the conversation to open back up again. If the person has any questions or comments that haven’t already come up, they’ve got a time to share these now. It’s also a good time for you to ask if the person has any questions about the business at a higher-level. Sometimes they aren’t as close to these topics as a manager, so if there’s any opportunity to record a comment from or bring them into a conversation with an SLT member, now is a good chance to talk about something a bit more separated from their day-to-day work.
Whether you follow these points or look to tweak them for your situation, it’s important that the agenda is clear so the conversations are explicit. Eventually the team members will also know the agenda well and start to come prepared with notes for each section.