to grow your people faster, change weekly 1-1's to monthly half-day observations
About 10 years ago, I found myself in a strange situation. I’d moved from being a manager of individual contributors to suddenly needing to manage a rapidly-growing organization as we moved from 1 grade, to a full 4-grade high school, to having 7 schools spread between two cities. At the same time, I was coaching a group of leaders on the side, making monthly visits (at most) to follow-up on coaching and develop new skills.
Flying back from one such visit, it struck me* that my private coaching clients were getting better, faster than any of the employees who I was coaching direcetly at my own schools.
Maybe you can relate. Feeling like your organization or your direct reports are a little stuck, like the early thrill of rapid improvement has given way to a sort of malaise? Teammates not growing as aggressively or ambitiously as is possible?
One potential culprit that is sometimes to blame: Weekly one-on-one meetings with teammates — the default in most organizations, it seems — may not be the best engine of rapid development for your team at this moment. There are a few reasons for this. First, weekly meetings tend to rely mostly on self-reported data of how things are going rather htan direct observation. They often feature a “kitchen sink” approach to conquering all of the tiny issues that emerged throughout the week. In short, weekly meetings are often consumed by small-potatoes issues rather than a zoomed-out question of, “What single thing could most efficiently improve across-the-board performance of this person I lead?”
The antidote to this may be to replace your weekly one-on-one meetings with monthly, half-day observation+coaching sessions. Ride along with your direct reports as they engage in the highest-stakes routines of their job, noting strengths and gaps, coaching in real time constantly. At the end of the day, take stock of key development priorities.
In a later post, I’ll lay out the specifics of how to do this in greater detail. For now I’ll simply note that this structure has several benefits. It’s all real-time performance you observe, not self-reported data. It provides a massive data grab on everything that could present a gap in development. And it forces discipline on your part — if you won’t see this person for another month, the pressure is on for you to focus only on the highest-leverage moves they can make to grow most rapidly. Without having frequent meetings as a justification for focusing on small potatoes, you can’t afford to do anything but focus on the most important, urgent areas of their development. And then, after communicating all this, they have a month to practice and improve all the things you discussed (motivated by the sense that they have to have something dramatic to show when you meet a month later).
Keep growing,
Ben
*While I wish I could take credit for the insight, this realization is actually owed primarily to the fact that I was binge-listening to relationship therapist Esther Perel’s excellent podcast while traveling. Of note, Perel only meets with couples one time, in a marathon 4-hour session. This approach, she describes, creates an urgency in her to figure out the single most important thing that’ll transform the struggling couple’s relationship.
