Oops I'm a Manager - On More Effective 1-on-1 Meetings - posit::conf(2023)
Presented by Andrew Holz As a team leader (accidental or not), it's easy to get caught up in the daily grind and overlook the importance of 1-on-1s. Bad idea. 1-on-1s are critical for building trust, providing feedback, and ensuring that everyone is on the same page. Keys to good 1-on-1s start with a small amount of prep and a running shared document of notes and takeaways. Another key is to rotate types of 1-on-1s. Possibilities include "heads down" on recent work, "heads up" looking further out, and career-focused sessions. After some tips on the right sort of questions and uncovering sneaky issues, I will also touch on effective feedback. I will share resources and hope to include Seussian visuals and a few poetic lines to help the key points stick. Presented at Posit Conference, between Sept 19-20 2023, Learn more at posit.co/conference. -------------------------- Talk Track: Building effective data science teams. Session Code: TALK-1064
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
I actually want to start out with just thanking you so much all for being here. I really appreciate your time. I know that little show there did not show it, but I really do. I really appreciate this opportunity to talk to you.
So my name is Andrew Holtz, and the name of my presentation is Oops, I'm a Manager, and I'd like to start off by talking a little about who I am to set that context.
So who I am now is I'm at posit, I am an Engineering Manager there on the Open Source group, and I get to spend my time supporting the Shiny team, and the Quarto team, ML Ops team, ML Verse team, working with amazing people. But if we roll back the clock a little, say about 25 years ago, I was a System Engineer at Bell Labs, and I was coding some C++, doing some mapping stuff, having a good time, writing lots of requirements documents, those were big then, working on a big operational support system, and then a different group within my department kind of spun out and took over some products, and they recruited me to join them.
So there I am, you know, young, starting off my career with like a dozen or so experienced Bell Labs, grizzled veterans, we got 10 years, 15 years, 25 years in the trenches, we're now starting this new venture, and they're looking for someone to help organize, looking to help someone set goals, deal with the little customer stuff. Pretty much everyone else in that line took a big step back. And I was kind of standing forward, and I said, oh, well, I have my Computer Science and Psychology double major, yeah, let's go, let's give it a shot. So I sort of started like really early on into this management role.
Why one-on-ones matter
So this today is me having had this great experience getting into it early in this technical managerial path, and I've had so many opportunities through it, and I kind of want to share it, and I want to share it through one particular exercise around one-on-ones that I think is a great way to test out if maybe this is a path for you, and that's the goal here today.
So why one-on-ones? Why do I want to talk about one-on-ones so much? Well, one-on-ones, in my experience, create trust, like you're talking to that other person, it's individual, you're talking about what matters, it's in a very specific context, that builds up trust over time, and that's the connective tissue that make really great teams work. If there's a lot of trust among the team, you're going to have a team that's really executing at a high level, and I'll tell you, being part of a team that's executing at a high level is like the best kind of way to work and a lot, a lot of fun.
So why one-on-ones though specifically? There's a lot of leadership things you could talk about to help the team. Well, the fact of the matter is, one-on-ones, if you're doing them right, are scheduled regularly. They're two people, so there's room for both of them, and in fact, a need for both of them to actively participate, and that because it's repeated, and because it's a shared responsibility, both people need to do their part of it, no matter what role you're in, in an organization, one-on-ones give you the opportunity to practice your leadership skills.
So it's really good to focus in on, it's regular, so it happens, and you can say, hey, how did that one go, learn over time, and you can exercise leadership muscles, again, from pretty much any position in a company or in an organization.
And then lastly, again, one-on-ones are just really important. Some conversations aren't going to happen anywhere else that are so important about career growth and opportunities and things like that. You got to have one-on-ones to have those, and then there's also some other topics that maybe aren't so obvious that are important, so I'd like to talk just a little bit more about that.
So I'm not a neurologist, know very little about the brain, but I did take my psych classes, and so to set this up, maybe you've been in a meeting where someone was talking about something and someone else kind of overreacted, maybe didn't just overreact a little but seemed to kind of freak out over something relatively innocuous, well, we have some brain chemistry going on there. The prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that's responsible for logic and rationality and deep work and all this great stuff. We also have amygdalas that were really important to human surviving and all these things along those years.
Well, what does the amygdala do? It's scanning the environment. It's scanning the environment, looking for danger, and if danger comes up, it tells your prefrontal cortex, hey, quiet down, we don't have any time for your crap, we need to fight or flight. Well, the fact of the matter is group meetings are complex environments, and so you have this risk of actually having that amygdala trigger over something maybe that didn't seem like it deserved it, but it triggers it, shuts down rationality, you get that overreaction, and it can really cause a lot of damage that you can stay with a team for a long time.
So we have these really important topics, not just about career growth, but about other things that are best covered in a one-on-one. So hopefully I've made the case that one-on-ones are pretty important. Again, we got better one-on-ones, we're building trust between team members, that results in stronger teams over time.
Three types of one-on-ones
What I'd like to do is run through three different flavors. There's some overlap here. You may have a different role in different ones. It's okay, there's a little bit of a lesson, hopefully, from any of them. We're going to talk about a goal for each one, and then we're going to talk about a specific tactic. Because in my experience, if you have a habit, if you can build it in, you can get better at something and improve. And if you don't have a simple thing to do to repeat, it's hard to kind of keep it front of mind and keep getting better at it.
So first type, most common type, probably the most important one, probably applies to pretty much everyone here. We have a team lead and a team member. We're trying to build trust. We know that that's one of the goals I've already made the case for, that that's just so important to a team operating. And then we have the idea of establishing goals. And by establishing goals, I mean, what's the group goals? You want to make sure we're on the same page and understanding of that. We also have individual goals. And really what we want is alignment between them.
So a really good career conversation, again, one of those foundational one-on-one ideas, is getting aligned of, hey, I'm really interested in learning this thing, and hey, the team has a gap in that. Let's put them together. That's a great career conversation. That's going to set both the team and the individual up to be successful within it.
Giving feedback. Obviously, one-on-ones are a really important place to do that. And I mean both ways. Giving feedback isn't just team lead to team manager. It is both team lead to the team member and back, vice versa.
So one of the things that I learned over time, or I got taught, let's say, about management and doing one-on-ones is, well, if you have to give someone feedback, you feed them a crap sandwich. So we have a piece of bread. I guess that's the good part. And then we have the harsh criticism maybe in the middle. So I guess that's the crap. And then another piece of bread on the other end to make a sandwich of it. My experience, that's fine. You definitely want a mix of good and bad things. You want to predominate with good as much as you can. Focus on positives where you can, not avoiding the important feedback when it comes up.
But in my experience, it's much better to start with a, here's a specific observation. This is something that happened in as factual terms as I can. And then ask questions about it. Don't assume you know that everything's going on. That is a form of feedback. Hey, here's this behavior. Maybe it had some consequences. Maybe it wasn't ideal. But let's talk about it. I want to understand it better. I want to see where you're coming from and make sure I get it. That's the two version of feedback. And then you can turn up the volume as you get comfortable, as you understand the person and how they react.
Because some people, you can say all the great things in the world and have one little negative one. They're going to obsess about the negative one. And your next five one-on-ones will be affected by that. Other people, they'll only hear the positives. You said something you felt was pretty direct and somehow flies right over their head. They miss it. So you got to be attentive to what's going on in the conversation and say, OK, how is this landing? And turn it up over time. That's a better way than the crap sandwich.
Tactic one: topic scorecard
A bunch of different questions here. These are all really good topics, categories, checking in, what are our priorities. We got our feedback one we already talked about. We got our career conversations. I'm just going to call out one that I really personally have gotten a lot of value on, which is the in the middle for the check-in, any sneaky issues worrying you. So what do I mean by a sneaky issue? That's something that's small, maybe in the back of someone's mind. It's kind of picking at them and picking at them. It's not a big deal. You don't need to bring it up yet, but it's simmering, it's simmering, and then it boils over. And once it boils over, it's actually a big problem. If you can ask questions that get you to those earlier simmering levels, it's much easier to address challenges.
If you can ask questions that get you to those earlier simmering levels, it's much easier to address challenges.
So that's just one of my personal favorites from this big list here. So I told you tactics. These tactics are going to be dead simple. They're going to be so obvious. Some of them you probably already do. But if you build in the habits around them and give them a try and put the multiples together, you're going to get more out of one-on-ones, you're going to move your team forward.
So the first tactic, topic scorecard, all you're going to do is take a list like that one I have in here. I have a link to it at the end. You can use that list. You can do your own list, but you're going to set your alarm for five minutes before your next one-on-one with whoever it is, and you're going to pull up that list of topics and you're just going to spend a little bit of time planning out what's a good topic for me and that person this week, this month. Five minutes is all I ask for. Makes a huge difference in adding the quality. You're about to spend a half hour or 45 minutes with this person going through stuff. All you have to do is take five minutes ahead of time to do a little bit of planning. It goes a really long way.
One-on-ones with your boss
So one last comment on team leads and team member one-on-ones, a lot of data teams I find are matrixed. So what do I mean by that? You have a data person, they're on a team with maybe a bunch of software developers or another skill set going on, and then they report, the data person reports up through a data chain, like a data management team and that kind of thing. If you have that situation, I just encourage you to spend a little extra time in that supportive mode and spend time talking about the goals of that team.
So moving on to the next type of one-on-one. We have you and your boss. So for you and your boss, you're going to want to spend a little more time here prepping for it because frankly, what does boss mean? So we're assuming some level up or even a couple of levels up the hierarchy. Basically, each level up is going to add complexity. It's going to add more stuff that they're supposed to know about. And so you're going to help them by setting a little bit more context and being understanding about where they're coming from. I mean, basically, the wider your scope, the more things you don't know. And that's part of why managers often seem clueless. And I say that as a manager who has often seemed clueless. Wider scope, more likely not to know things. That's just the nature of the beast.
So when you're going into that, you're going to say, okay, I need to understand a little bit more about where my boss is coming from. And I'm going to try and tailor to that like, wow, they have a wider scope. I want to understand where they're coming from, tailor it to that, make it efficient for them to remember things and help them through that.
Another goal we have is to really avoid meeting surprises. If they find out about something that's gone wrong on your team or something that wasn't delivered, but it's with meetings with some of their peers or those kind of things, you don't want them to find out from someone else. So one of your goals is always when you're looking at your topics, if you have something that they might hear about later, try and give them the heads up. That's going to go a long way to avoiding painful situations in conversations later.
And then my last thought on this goal is just be explicit about what you're asking for from them. That'll help them give you the feedback. If you're saying, hey, this is just to inform you of what I'm doing or what's going on in the team or this thing about the project, say, informing. If it's more like, hey, I really want some advice about this, I don't know this or that, ask for advice, be specific. The last thing is if you need an action for them, call it out. Ask, say, hey, I need your action, I need your help on this thing, get this funding, go to that other person, that kind of thing. So again, you're meeting with your boss, ask and categorize those different things.
Tactic two: shared document
Again, super simple. You're probably doing this, maybe you are, maybe you aren't, I highly recommend it if you're not. All we're going to do is have a shared document. That's going to be the history of our different one-on-ones that we've had. So you're going to just have a date, you're going to have the topics that you picked out in the previous five minutes before, maybe a little bit of stuff on there, and then takeaways and action items. And then you're going to rotate those down in the shared list. Again, that's going to be the context that I mentioned is a goal, help your boss. They can kind of read through those things, they can put stuff in there, all stuff like that.
One-on-ones with peers
So I think not having my notes, I'm running a little behind. So I apologize for the speed of the end, but I'm going to kind of power on through here. So the third type, so we have two tactics and two types. Last one is between you and your peers. In that one, you're going to really focus on the shared space that you have together. A lot of organizations, whether it's at the team level or the bigger group level, a lot gets lost between team members or between groups. There's essentially gaps that open up, and you're going to use the one-on-one to establish what that landscape is. Hey, where do we have dependencies? Where could things get disconnected? That kind of thing.
Again, you have these gaps, and you're going to use your one-on-one with peers to fill those in. Again, between members of a team or across into other ones. You can almost think of it as a little mini retrospective, like what's going well, what's not going well? Let's explore this.
I guess as a pro tip in this one, offering a little bit of help can go a really long way, whether maybe that's across groups or that kind of thing, and accepting help if they have it. That is going to build up trust, help fill that gap, and not allow things and allow waste to kind of fall in those gaps in between.
Tactic three: network graph
So our third tactic, we're going to just do, and we're going to be intentional about planning our one-on-ones. So what do I mean by that? We're going to just do a little network graph. We're going to put ourselves in the center. We're the center of the universe. That's wonderful. We're going to put other people that we need from the organization around us to help us, and for us to help them. The most important relationships you're going to have, and you're just going to look at it, and you're going to put the closeness for how important they are. Then you're going to look at your one-on-one schedule and say, hey, does my one-on-one schedule reflect who I think the most important relationships to my success and my group's success are? My guess is if you do that, there's a couple that are missing.
And the pro tip in this case is don't just have one-on-ones, especially with peers of the ones you like, and have a good time. Some one-on-ones are fun. Often it's the one-on-ones that aren't as fun, or the relationships that need work, or where the gaps are going to open up. So don't fall into the trap of, oh, that's the fun one. I'll keep doing those. And oh, there's this other one, and ah, it didn't get rescheduled. I'm going to let that go. Don't fall into that trap.
So network graph, be intentional. And frankly, all things have their seasons. There may be times where, hey, the last couple one-on-ones haven't been that fruitful. Make it less frequent. Let it drop off the list.
What we're going for in all of these things is something that has come up a lot for me at Posit in particular, which is we're trying to get people aligned enough and not have gaps so that they can make a lot of their own decisions. They can stay independent, do what they need to do. But they're doing it pulling in the same direction. And it's sort of interesting, because Posit, again, I'm working with the open source teams, amazing teams. These are some of the most autonomous software engineers I've worked with in my long history of doing this. So having goals that are understood, having trust between team members gets that much more important. So you're enabling the autonomy. So it's really important, again, aligned. We're going in the same direction. But autonomous, we know enough to make really good decisions and be independent and get our piece of the work done.
Closing thoughts
So yeah, in conclusion, I'm just making a plug for technical management. It's been an awesome career choice for me. It's been really interesting, different challenges. And frankly, there's often opportunities, because so many technical people are afraid of kind of, oh, I don't want to fall into the trap of going into management. It means there's opportunities there, and not just opportunities for yourself, but opportunities to serve the team.
OK, down to my last minute, I want to just indulge my silly Dr. Seuss stuff a little bit more. And I have a quick poem that's hopefully going to remind you about everything and maybe even cover some of the things I missed since I haven't had my speaker notes.
In the land of the office where meetings reside, let's talk about one-on-ones. Oh, they can't be denied. For they're more than just chatter, more than just talk, they're the path to success, not a casual walk. So listen up closely, for tactics are here to make all your one-on-ones something quite dear.
Tactic one, my friend, is a tip quite divine. Rotate different topics, let variety shine. Don't dwell on status, oh no, not too long, for a mix of discussions will make your bond strong. Tactic two, you see, is a gem quite rare. Always prepare notes, show that you care. Keep a shared running set for both you and for me, so when we look back, our progress we'll see. Tactic three, ah yes, is the key to the door. Draw out relationships, you'll find so much more. Schedule frequency and length oh so wisely, for those are the moments that matter precisely.
So there you have it, tactics one, two, and three. Apply them with care, and then you will see, though they may seem simple, don't let that confound, for their impact on success is truly profound. As your one-on-ones flourish, like a well-tended tree. Together, together, how great we will all be. Thank you very much.