As a new manager, you’ve been told to setup check-ins with you team, but what does that even mean? Depending on your own experience, you might not even know where to begin. You may be worried about any number of things:
- How often should we meet
- What do you talk about?
- How do you fill the time?
- What happens if the other person doesn’t want to talk?
- What insight can I possibly provide to this person as a new manager myself?
- Even worse, what should I do if I was recently promoted within my team, and now I’m managing my former colleagues?
When you combine it altogether, check-ins can become a daunting task instead of an opportunity to grow. These are some of my top tricks to not only ease check-in concerns, it adds value for both you and your team.
1) Prioritize check-ins
I believe you should have a formal one-on-one check-in with each team member at least once every other week. With a new employee, you may do weekly, but a bi-weekly cadence has been most effective in my experience. Once scheduled, that time should be sacred.
Time management is one of the most challenging skills to learn as a new manager. Typically, we’ve been promoted to managing people because we’ve been successful as an individual contributor. Moving to management can be a challenging transition because we are now responsible for multiple people and projects. Because we typically have so many things pulling us in so many directions, we can fall prey to any number of pitfalls
- We delay setting up check-ins.
- We reschedule them when we get busy.
- Worst of all, we cancel check-ins because we don’t have anything to tell our team member.
Setting up time with your team can provide value when run effectively. Not only does it help build rapport and trust with team members, it can give you early insight into team challenges that you might have missed otherwise.
2) A Check-in isn’t a status meeting!
I can’t emphasize this enough. Status meetings are for status updates. You should be talking to your team regularly both formally and informally about project updates in order to keep track of progress. Nothing can derail an effective check-in like deep diving into project progress. Inevitably details about day to day work and projects will come up during the meeting, but the focus should be on how those projects are impacting the individual, not deadlines.
Focus on the employees’ work life balance and mental health. Too often these long term aspects are overlooked at the expense of short term progress.
3) Have an agenda
Too much time and too many meetings are a complete time suck because the organizer doesn’t have a plan for their meeting. At bare minimum, every meeting needs the following:
- Why are we having this meeting?
- Who should be there?
- What insight are the attendees providing?
- What are the desired outcomes?
When it comes to check-in meetings, we control the agenda, and we should have a plan for what we want to accomplish with each one. While I try to stay flexible if a discussion goes down a pathway, I try to cover these topics in each meeting:
- How is your current workload? Are you being overworked?
- Are you being challenged enough?
- Do you have any concerns that I should be aware of?
My goal during a one-on-one is to understand what I challenges my team member is having, and what I can do to help them be successful.
4) Identify and reinforce Strengths
Another thing I try to accomplish with my check-in is to explore a team member’s strengths and reinforce anything I’ve seen since the last meeting. Have he or she send an email or report in a way I appreciated. Are they managing their own projects effectively? Have I heard that their clients are happy? Let them know what they are doing well.
In addition to providing feedback, try to understand from them what work they are currently doing that they are enjoying. Is there anything they want to do more of? It’s amazing the kinds of insights I’ve gotten from my team simply by asking what they like doing. I then use that information to look for projects or tasks that I can delegate from my own responsibilities that they enjoy and can help them progress in their career.
5) Provide feedback on weaknesses
This area is often overlooked at the expense of being nice. We don’t let the employee know where they need to improve, and it inevitably ends up blindsiding the employee during their end of year review. Our check-ins should be used to let the team member know where they aren’t meeting expectations on a regular basis so that they can make adjustments as needed.
6) Reassess annual goals
On a quarterly basis, I like to reassess a team member’s annual goals. We all have lofty goals at the beginning of the year, but when the rubber hits the road, there are unforeseen challenges and pivots that need to be taken into account. When reviewing annual goals, I look for the following:
- What is the progress on your annual goals?
- Are there any goals that we established at the beginning of the year that don’t make sense anymore?
- Have we added new projects or responsibilities that aren’t currently captured in your annual goals?
Taking this time regularly to informally review allows you both to stay on the same page for goals.
7) Probe for goals
I love to use check-ins to probe for my team’s long term goals. Rarely is a team member in the final place they want to be. Counterintuitively, asking my team members what they wanted to do next has actually been incredibly successful at keeping them on my team. Many times manager’s fear losing good employees, so they dig their head’s in the sand. Instead of planning for employees to move on, they avoid the topic altogether.
This leads to managers being surprised when a team member does leave. I would rather be the first person to know if someone is looking at another role internally or externally. While you can’t guarantee employees will be honest with you, if you are regularly asking what their career goals are, you at least let them know the door is open and that they can come to talk to you when it does come up. This makes succession planning much easier in the long run. In addition, I can use their career aspirations to identify opportunities for new projects or stretch goals.
8) Encourage learning
Some of the most valuable advice I received from a previous manager is that a company’s Education Reimbursement is part of my salary, and every year I don’t use it, I’m basically giving away money. It’s a lesson I still haven’t forgotten. We should be encouraging our employees to learn new skills, and education reimbursement is an often overlooked benefit for our team members. Reminding the employee in check-ins that they should be using the reimbursement provides two benefits:
- It shows you care about their career
- It can add new skills to your team
We’re so often focused on short term goals that we forget to make the investment in learning that is needed to stay on top of our careers.
Bring it all together
Keeping these eight tricks in mind will help you make the most of your time with your check-in. Instead of wondering what you will talk about, you now have an abundance of topics to cover that will help you build a successful relationship with your team.
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