Questions I ask during 1:1 with my direct reports | Hacker News Reader

Questions I ask during 1:1 with my direct reports

bdicroce.medium.com

11 pointsbdicroce27 comments

>You see, I want to create a work environment where what makes us feel respected, cared for and listened to abound.

No, OP doesn't. He has a meeting template that forces his reports to spin workplace white lies for an hour every month. This blogpost is just to show off how good he is at two faced managerial 'humanity'.

Spoilers for OP: Not actually that good. Half those questions are obvious traps, and in context make the other questions flagrantly suspicious. People at the bottom of the hierarchy understand "managing up" even if they don't have that word in their vocabulary.

If the manager isn't satisfied with receiving a "hmmmm, I can't think of anything in particular at this time off the top of my head" for most of these questions 80% of the time, then these questions require a level of introspection that would necessitate setting aside 30-60 minutes of pre-work for the meeting to do introspection and brainstorming, or what most likely happens is the report just makes up some bullshit on the fly that they think their manager wants to hear to "what motivated you this past month at work?" or "what are some ideas you have now that you’d like us to try implementing in our team?".

For those of us who are spending all of our cognitive horsepower just to keep rowing the boat forward and meeting expectations and don't have spare hours to just wander and contemplate lief and work and motivation and improvements to process or the team, this seems like a recipe for receiving random bullshit answers.

UNLESS - the manager were to schedule time for that pre-work, like setting 30 min on the cal for separately brainstorming answers and then 30 min immediately after discussing anything that came up. Which I _do_ think would be awesome.

But just saying "hey here's a google doc, any time you have a thought pop up during the next couple weeks jot it down" won't even work. You need to schedule and prioritize it agains the other tasks you are asking the report to work on.

Does anybody else find it frustrating to be asked about their home life at work?

I'm sure managers have their reasons, but I'm here to do however many hours are expected of me as negotiated as part of the hiring process and then go home and have a life with the people I actually love and care about. The deal is that they intrude as little as possible on my time while I'm at work and in return, work does not intrude on my time at home.

I'm not here to talk about my personal life. I'm here to get shit done. Get out of my way and let me get on with it.

Yeah, I had a similar head-tilt at leading with "How are you doing on a personal level?" I'm not outright opposed to the question -- managers are human (gasp) and it is true that we tend to work better with humans when we connect with them as such -- but it's going to take a lot of prior work for anyone with professional power over me to convince me that question is for my benefit and not simply to extract more value.

Bingo, and this is it:

> if the person isn’t in a positive state of mind or heart outside of work, chances are that she won’t be as effective at work

Aka next person on the pink slip list.

This person would be a terrible manager of anyone neurodivergent.

Most, if not all, managers I've had are terrible for neurotypical. I imagine it's sort of like talking to the cops as a neurodivergent person. You're just guilty because you don't behave "right".

I think I might be neurodivergent but I'm not going to get diagnosed so I have no idea. I will say it seems like no team I have ever been on really understood what to do with me. Which -- fine, I don't care to do anything with them.

This is essentially standard 1:1 at my prior company. It worked amazingly well.

People aren’t robots. They get tired. They get distracted. They can’t show up for work every day and give perfect, 100%.

I’ve been asked and asked that type of question frequently to help understand if I needed to be mindful of temporary circumstances. It often works out that one person on the team is feeling high energy when someone else is feeling low. It’s not permanent, so you make minor short term tweaks. Particularly, on the small stuff. I’d tried to go to someone who’s feeling higher energy.

Over time, it tends to even out. Or, at the very least, people who are frequently high energy feel satisfied with a full queue while others have a chance to refocus. At some point, that probably means high energy person is going to get some slack to do a bit more 20% type of work.

You end up with a team that delivers on its core competencies while keeping most people happy.

> Does anybody else find it frustrating to be asked about their home life at work?

Not frustrating, but certainly inappropriate. I haven't run into this very often, but when I have, I just kept my answers vague and generic.

"do hours"

"the people [not at work] I actually love and care about"

"they intrude"

"get out of my way"

Have you tried not being an active adversary at work?

I've worked with a lot of people with this attitude, it generally doesn't serve them well and creates a self-fulfilling feedback loop.

I'm not an active adversary at work - I'm highly productive, work well with others, and have a slew of positive recommendations from both managers and co-workers. What I do not have is an ownership or equity stake in the business that I currently work for - at best there's a bonus opportunity. Since I do not own or have equity in the business it's not my place to commit more than what was agreed to with my employer at the time of my hiring - in fact, it would be unprofessional and against my best interests to do so. If they want more from me then they can pay me more (the same as they expect from their customers) - they don't get loyalty or credit in lieu of payment from me as they have no loyalty to me (and would lay me off if it made sure they could keep showing growth to investors). Of course I'm flexible for emergencies as anybody should be, but, at the end of the day, it's a job. It pays my bills - I'm working it to live, not living to work at it.

That said, I'm sure my position would change slightly if I was the owner of the business or had equity in it and my efforts could materially increase profit and directly benefit me. Alas, that is not this position, and I'd argue it is both unprofessional and certainly unhealthy to give up other obligations and relationships for a job like this.

> "the people [not at work] I actually love and care about"

I don't love my coworkers, and I never will - not in the same way that I love my family and love my friends. That is just a cold hard reality about business. At some point they may stop working here. At some point I definitely will stop working here (likely for a better paying job or a job with better working conditions). There is no point to becoming any more attached to my coworkers than the standard cordial business relationship. I'm friendly to them, I am accommodating in ways that I can within my responsibilities to the business, but they are not my friends and they are not my family. I am responsible on a different level and with a different commitment to my friends and family in ways that I am not with coworkers. Perhaps this is a difference in philosophy, but I don't care to hear from or spend time with coworkers outside of work. I have friends, family, hobbies, projects, and other things to do - life is too short to sit in too many cookouts with coworkers off the clock to talk about things at work to the uncompensated benefit of my boss and to the detriment of time with my friends and family.

I appreciate the more nuanced reply, and I think those are pretty reasonable positions. Your original reply, again, seemed like you were angry that a manager might care about how you're doing as a person and that they had ulterior motives for wanting to talk to you. My personal position isn't that you need to love or even like your coworkers/managers/employees as friends, or spend time with them without compensation, but caring about others as people and not as cogs in a machine is important in building a professional career.

I've seen too many people in the workplace wall themselves off, actively resist building any connections, never see advancement or try to grasp any opportunities, and then they leave for whatever reason and not a single person in their orbit gave a fuck that that they ever existed.

>but caring about others as people and not as cogs in a machine is important in building a professional career.

You're ignoring power dynamics. It's impossible for a manager and their reports to have real relationships and conversations. Asking them questions they shouldn't answer honestly is just self-serving.

A manager who wants to "care" about their employees as people is just doing a disservice to those employees. They can be understanding, they can provide flexibility for employees to take care of themselves, but they can't and shouldn't try to ask employees about their personal feelings.

The only way this would come up for me is in the area of performance problems and as a way to try to provide accommodations if necessary. Definitely seems weird for it to be a standard question. If you've built up enough of a relationship with folks, they will tend to share these kinds of details. Folks who prefer it remains private won't. That's perfectly okay as long as work is getting done.

Along with that, asking employees to "bring your whole self to work" seems unlikely to end well.

"Bring your professional facade to work" is probably a more sensible practice.[1]

See also: "We think of our (terrible) company as a (pathologically abusive, possibly organized crime) family."

[1] https://www.economist.com/business/2022/06/02/do-not-bring-y...

It really depends on the company culture. My company tends to have a lot of personal discussion in 1:1s because we’re remote, it’s safe to do so, and we often have other avenues for conversations managers need to have.

If someone is getting their work done and wants to talk about their hobby for their entire 1:1, that’s fine.

It is never safe to do that. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Manager is taking notes. Always.

>I came up with a template that would help me guide the conversation

Maybe it's just a different style, but when I was a manager my 1 on 1s with my team was their chance for them to set the agenda. They had 30 mins of my undivided attention to discuss what THEY wanted to talk about. Except in rare cases, anything on my agenda was fit in at the end or I booked separate time for it.

Completely agree. This is what I do with every team.

I explicitly tell everyone when I implement one on ones that this isn’t a status meeting, a performance review meeting, or anything else. This is 30 minutes once a month to ensure if all else fails there’s time set aside where they have my undivided attention to talk about whatever they want or need to. And I always make sure to make clear that the expectation isn’t that they will box this stuff into this 30 minutes once a month, that this is just ensuring a baseline and they’re welcome to book me any time for any reason to talk.

I only implement them once I’ve been in place long enough to build some sense of trust and psychological safety among the team. I have no interest in wasting time on meetings where I push the conversation along while they blow smoke up my ass.

The entire template for the meeting from my end is: “On a scale from 1-4 how are you doing (no half points)? Why?”. Everywhere else that meeting goes is conversational and driven by whatever they want to talk about. It’s _their_ time.

Even the most curmudgeonly people I’ve worked with who met the initial suggestion with complaints and eye rolls got on board very quickly.

>without knowing why, after 2 PM most of our brains are quite fried. So, we changed that.

And by "changed that" OP means moving the important meeting before 2. Whether everyone still feels spent every afternoon, and if he even cares just gets glossed over. Weird flex, but OK.

That list of questions rather epitomizes everything that I hate about 1:1s, to be honest. They're a minefield and the risk is that there will be adverse professional consequences for giving the "wrong answer".

I get where most of these are coming from, but real personal connections can't come from 1:1s. They come from actual, reasonably frequent, informal interactions over time.

Hmmm I am not into this.

Maybe it’s being coloured by my most recent work experience, but - this is the kind of stuff I would about with a friend, or a trusted coworker. Having a frank conversation about these topics with my boss is fraught as fuck.

Are 1:1s the manager kabuki equivalent of Agile? Everyone does them, no one benefits from them?

It 100% depends on the manager and how they use these meetings.

I use them to catch up with the team. To give them undivided attention. And primarily to allow them to vent in a closed setting. When neither of us has much to say, we end them early. Sometimes they last 5 minutes, other days 45.

I’ve done experiments where we’d do 1on1s for a while then stop doing them. Inevitably, in the next retro, at least 1 person would complain about us cancelling 1on1s.

Like everything in corporate business, they are as useful as you make them.

Good lord I'd never vent with a co-worker especially a boss. That's a quick way to become an outsider on the team.

>I’ve done experiments where we’d do 1on1s for a while then stop doing them. Inevitably, in the next retro, at least 1 person would complain about us cancelling 1on1s.

Did you restart the 1:1 just for that person or persons? Let the rest of us not bother with that white lie factory?

I've been in organizations that never did them. Nothing of value was lost.

Bad start if he's dealing with an introvert.

Tailor the sequence to the personality.

Why is it bad with dealing with an introvert? We're not closed off or any more private than extroverts. We just drain faster in social situations. We're not children that need to be coddled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com