What is your philosophy for effective one-to-ones?

Original prepared answer

Philosophy

I believe developing a relationship with everyone in your team is incredibly valuable and the one-on-one-meeting framework gives you the opportunity to have the communication and open space to develop that.

I set up a 1:1 once every fortnight with my SDE-1s and SDE-2s; twice or thrice a week with my tech-leads, SDE-3s and architects.

Whenever I join a new team or a new team member onboards, the first 1:1 I keep it about laying the groundwork trying to understand them as a person and what their skills and commitment levels are

Get to know their background; from where they are and what their education is. And how did they end up in this company and in this role? This gives me an idea about what has been their career path and what they have been looking for. Things like are they looking for a specific domain to work in like e-com, or ad-tech or fin-tech. I am able to figure out why they left their previous company. Also what role they want to get to like if its an IC role or a leadership or a mix of both. Also I get to know if a specific tech stack is what they are interested in. So essentially what drives this person. It's a one time thing and need not be revisited

This framework is primarily for them to have a space where they can open about anything:

Concerns, discomforts and clarity

• Feeling disheartened by some comment from someone

• Feeling that their effort or work is not appreciated enough or their current work is not rewarding

• If they are feeling overburdened

• Any suggestions like having some happy hour sessions or creation of a learning sessions within the team

• Showing discomfort about how one of their tech advancement suggestions was ignored or was not appreciated

• They can even speak about how great they are feeling about the job as well. And we get excited together

Announce something from my end

• The company is thinking about opening office in hybrid model and get their opinion about it

• Someone new might be joining their team and their skillset

• Any new projects that are coming in

Setting expectations with a team member

• If its someone senior, I talk about their responsibilities are based on their levels defined by the company

• Map it to their current performance and behaviors and appreciate them for their work and try to figure out if there are any room for improvements

• Set expectations around the impact of a project that they are doing or the importance of delivering some project within deadlines

Delivering them positive and constructive feedbacks

• Congratulate them of the great things that they have been doing like some cross-team integration that they finished seamlessly or major bug fix in production or in general some code that they refactored or optimized

• Also at the same time delivering feedback on something that they need to improve like some bug they introduced in prod or some deadline miss and how to improve on those fronts. I always give instances from my past where I also made similar mistakes and what approach I took to reduce or avoid those mistakes.This makes them feel human and finds the feedback as an opportunity for improvement. That is essentially the final goal of mine. My job is not to evaluate and create a scorecard. My job is to make them the most efficient and productive, so passing on critical feedback has to be done in a way that it gets received and acted upon in a constructive way.

• Tech lead had a poor sprint

• Missed delivery because of delayed integration from external service or extended QA

• Passing on feedback from tech lead for another team member

• Developer missing writing proper unit tests

Working towards creating micro processes or plan path to help them in prioritizations, deliveries, cross-team communications etc

• Whether she is a SDE-1 looking to learn new technologies or a senior engineer trying to level-up, they will need a plan to do so. This meeting is a good place to coach them on processes or to help them come up with a process themselves.

• Dev's case for publisher-renderer task management

• Creating release plan for Arjun

Setting career goals, planning out the progress and tracking them till they are achieved

• When we establish a mutual understanding of creating a career path for someone for level-up or learning goals, I create a check-list in a format that can be edited and visible among the both of us.

• We keep updating the checklist in our day to date work. In the subsequent 1:1s, we spend some time visiting this document to analyze our progress. We check things like was I able to find or create opportunities for them, are they able to recognize an opportunity and act upon it. And based on our observations and assessment of our progress, we decide to change pace and set action items

Also I spend time talking about their personal things that they are comfortable talking about

• If someone is taking a vacation, we talk about the place they are going

• If someone is facing some family issues and they open up about it during the call then it allows me to be available for them and helps me to anticipate changes in their performance

• Someone looking for a change within the company, I try to find out if there any opportunity in their desired field