How to 1-on-1
Why I need to do this?
It is your responsibility to drive your own career growth No one knows what you want unless you speak it with others, so our company forces your manager to help you with that by weekly 1-on-1s.
A more practical reason is that your relationship with your manager largely determines your work experience.
Mindsets
1. Your manager is one of your resources
| I’m one of my manager’s resources | My manager is one of my resources |
|---|---|
| Don’t care about the company’s operations. | Discuss your dissatisfaction (if you have) with the company’s performance in this 2-month cycle and inquired about how cofounders or teams plan to improve the current situation. |
| Execute your tasks assigned by your manager without asking. | Asked for an explanation of the task or project from your manager.If you think a project doesn’t have a good impact, just tell your manager why and ask him to stop this project. |
| Don’t talk about promotion or performance. Waiting for the manager to invite you for promotion. | Inquired about the standard for promotion and how to achieve it.Asked which preparations are needed for the next calibration. |
| The manager is right. | The manager may be wrong. |
2. Talk about things you don’t know about each other
| Talk about things you and your manager already know | Talk about things my manager doesn’t know or I need to know |
|---|---|
| Report work again after you just report them on daily standup. | Talk about the next thing or project you are planning to do and ask your manager to add it to the next 2-month ORKs. If you find there are too many tasks to deliver on time, please make sure your manager knows that you will miss the timeline. |
| Saying everything is fine, even if you receive some bad feedback about your team. | Tell your manager valuable feedback about your team if you received them from others. |
| Talked about impacts of a project that you just wrote in a PSA. | Review the project you just launched, ask for feedback from your manager. |
| Don’t talk too much. | Talk as much as you can. |
Other tips
Whenever you have some thoughts that you want to talk about in the next 1-on-1 meeting, send it to the meeting group and pin it.
Cancel a 1-on-1 meeting if you feel it’s unnecessary.
Don’t overuse 1-on-1. If a topic is public or needs to be public, talk about it in a public group.
Don’t “manage up”
Another typical loophole of “manage up” is that it often incurs unnecessary one-on-one meetings. You may not agree with me on this but that’s alright. So what do I mean by “unnecessary”? Put it this way — if someone can explicate an issue with a text message of around 100 characters, they wouldn’t need to set up a one-on-one with me. In fact, I would rather they post it in the group chat so that I wouldn’t have to pass on the information. But the reality is that I’m quite often dragged into one-on-one meetings on such issues. Why do people prefer one-on-one dialogues in person? I’ve found two main reasons. Firstly, a one-on-one dialogue creates information asymmetry that helps to “manage up” as it prevents potential critics from a third person. But if you post the same issue in a group chat, it’s very easy to see different opinions. Actually I don’t think most issues require one-on-one communication so long as it’s not classified. Secondly, one-on-one dialogues in person or over phone calls help to navigate negotiation strategies constantly. For example, if the person observes that you are pissed off by what he/she said earlier, they tend to pull back or tone down a bit. There are many other cases of “manage up”. I used to hear this — a PR employee probed into the WeChat and Toutiao channels that his/her boss subscribe to and posted PR contents on those channels for the boss to notice. I’m not sure how you feel about this. But I would feel that CEOs and leaders are quite troubled if they were to soak in an “manage up” environment where information is “retouched”. Suppose the information that directs to you is specially angled, or what we call “SEO-ed (search engine-optimized) information” at ByteDance, you will have to verify the information via other channels. That would be very counter-efficient.