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Episode 551: Vidal Graupera on Manager 1-1 with Direct Reports
Vidal Graupera, an Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about the importance of managers' one-on-one meetings with direct reports. They start by considering how a 1:1 meeting differs from other meetings...
Vidal Graupera, an Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, speaks with SE Radio’s Brijesh Ammanath about the importance of managers’ one-on-one meetings with direct reports. They start by considering how a 1:1 meeting differs from other meetings and then explore how a new line manager should go about introducing meetings with their team. Vidal describes the objectives that managers should aim to achieve, as well as what their direct reports should aim to achieve from these meetings. Key takeaways from the episode include an understanding of the typical structure and agenda for an effective 1:1 meeting, how to start and close the meeting, how to measure the meeting’s effectiveness. Graupera also describes some common challenges in real-life 1:1 meetings and offers recommendations on how to coach line managers to conduct better meetings.
Show Notes
- Personal Website : https://vidalgraupera.com/
- Managers Club : https://managersclub.com/about/
- Mega List of 1On1 Questions : https://github.com/VGraupera/1on1-questions
Transcript
Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine.
This transcript was automatically generated. To suggest improvements in the text, please contact [email protected] and include the episode number and URL.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:00:16 Welcome to Software Engineering Radio. I’m your host, Brijesh Ammanath, and today my guest is Vidal Graupera. Vidal is an engineering manager at LinkedIn. He’s the founder of Managers Club, an online site that helps share resources and experiences to inspire and help managers learn and improve. Vidal is the author of many books, including the Software Engineering Manager Interview Guide, Engineering Leadership Interviews, and Time Management for Engineering Managers. Vidal also maintains a mega list of one-on-one questions on GitHub, and this is how I first came to know about all the brilliant work he was doing in this area. I’ll make sure we have a link to this in the show notes. Vidal, welcome to Software Engineering Radio.
Vidal Graupera 00:00:55 Thanks for having me on the show. Very glad, very happy to be here. Very happy to be here.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:01:00 We will be talking today about manager one-on-ones with the direct reports. We will cover the basics, understand what a one-on-one is, why it’s important, what should an ideal one-on-one look like, how do you measure the effectiveness of one-on-ones, and the common challenges faced by both managers and directs in conducting one-on-ones. While preparing for the session, I also reached out to some of my friends and peers and have a list of challenges they have faced on the ground while doing one-on-ones. We’ll close the session by going through this list and see what suggestions Vidal may have for these scenarios. Before we deep dive into the one-on-ones, let’s take a step back and look at meetings in general. What are the different types of meetings that one usually sees in the enterprises, and how would they classified, Vidal?
Vidal Graupera 00:01:46 Well, there’s lots of meetings, of course. There’s one-on-ones, there’s staff meetings, all-hands meetings. If you’re running scrum, you might have a bunch of agile ceremonies like end of sprint demo meeting, retrospective meeting, sprint planning and grooming meetings. Those are very common in software engineering. Those are, there might be meetings to review RFCs, technical documents, things like that.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:02:14 Right. So, what is a one-on-one, and how is it different from the other types of meetings?
Vidal Graupera 00:02:20 Well, a one-on-one is a very special meeting. I think it’s actually one of the most important meetings a manager can have every week with his direct reports, and it’s private. So that’s one thing. They’re not recorded; they’re not intended to be for other people. So, I think that’s one thing that’s very different about them. And the purpose of the one-on-one, a lot of it is to build connection, understand how people are doing, where the other meetings sometimes are very related to moving a project forward or communicating or downloading some kind of information. So, these meetings are much more personal.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:03:01 Right. And what makes it important? What’s the outcome that we’re looking out from a one-on-one meeting?
Vidal Graupera 00:03:07 There are several things I’m looking for. One, especially nowadays in the realm of people working remote and hybrid, is to build a connection with the direct report. I think it’s important to build a connection with them, find out how they’re doing, how are they feeling, how’s their family, things like that. I think that’s very important. Another goal would be to answer any questions that a direct report might have because sometimes people are afraid to ask questions in a group setting. So, this is a good place for people to ask questions that maybe they’re not comfortable asking in a group setting or just maybe personal to themself — like, what are my possibilities of getting promoted, or what do I need to do to get to the next level? Which leads into career conversation. So, a good part of the one-on-one can be about someone’s career and career progression. And then a one-on-one is also very good way or place to give feedback because it’s not really a best practice, or it’s not really good, to give people feedback in public. So, at a one-on-one you can give people feedback confidentially.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:04:20 Understood. Let’s move on to the next section where we’ll deep dive into the one-on-ones and try to get into the really flesh it out. So, let’s start from the beginning. If you are a new line manager introducing one-on-ones in your team for the first time, how do you go about doing it?
Vidal Graupera 00:04:38 Well, I would tell everyone that I’m going to schedule one-on-ones with you. And so, you could expect an invite. I would tell them my goal in it; my goal is to connect with you, check in with you, give you an opportunity to ask questions, give you feedback. So, I would kind of set a little bit like why I’m doing it. I would let them know it’s not optional. Like, I actually made this mistake when I was starting out as a manager: I made one-on-ones optional for people. I would make, it’s not an optional meeting. Things happen and sometimes you can’t have the meeting, but generally we’d want to have the meeting. So, that’d be another thing I would tell them. So, I would tell them and then I would schedule the meeting with them. See, a lot of — well, almost no engineers are kind of trained in how to do a one-on-one. Few managers are, so there’s actually some blog posts and some eBooks that I found that talk about how to do a one-on-one with your manager. So, I also share these resources with my directs. Some of them read it, some don’t. These are some ideas as to what they might ask or look for in a one-on-one.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:05:55 Right. You touched on quite a few points that we will branch out and there will be questions on those that I’ll come to later. But before that, can you tell me or walk me through a typical one-on-one and is that a recommended structure? Is there an agenda for the one-to-one, or what should be the content of the one-to-one?
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