How Startup engineers leverage 1-1 meetings for fast-track growth
If your company do not have a 1-1 meeting culture, you are not alone, I've been in the same position and here's how you can initiate the first 1-1.
Outline:
What are 1-1 meetings
The Why and How
How to start doing it
How I keep track of it
Conclusion
What are 1-1 meetings
1-1 meetings is a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly catch up between two people, typically between you and your boss. A 30 minutes to 1 hour time-block in the calendar for you to talk about your work and problems.
I find it an uncommon culture and only experienced it after working at my current job (4th company). Hence why I decided to write this and encourage people to start doing it.
The Why and How
Career Growth
Here are some main components for fast early Career Growth (IMHO):
Figure out what you want and work towards it
Take on more responsibilities, big projects
Do more, fail fast, learn from feedback and iterate
And here’s how doing 1-1 meetings can help you achieve these components:
1. Figure out what you want and work towards it
Not everyone knows what they want in their career, especially when one just started working.
Talking to the bosses is a good way of figure things out, they are steps ahead of you and can share their journey on how they found out their goals.
With your career goals laid out clearly, we can then have a deeper conversation with manager on how they can support you to accomplish those goals at the company. There is no point working at a company just to build your bosses dream and not growing yourself towards your goals.
2. Take on more responsibilities, big projects
As the goals are laid out, working on projects that can help you reach those goals are important.
And through 1-1 with your bosses, you often time can get hints on what are the upcoming opportunities, convincing your boss to let you work on those that you find most helpful.
If your goal is to become a senior engineer, ask if you can take part in the system design of the next project. Or share some project ideas that is challenging (to grow yourself technically) but helpful to the company, and you would like to take the lead.
If your goal is to become a people manager, you can convince your boss to let you manage interns, starting with one. And through more and more 1-1 meetings, you talk about about the problems you had when managing intern, and learn from the conversations. One step closer to your own career goal.
And if they think you are not ready yet, you can get feedbacks on why and how you can work towards the project you want to be part of.
3. Do more, fail fast, learn from feedback and iterate
With every 1-1 meetings that I had, I was able to gain feedback and have an idea what to focus or continue working on next.
A common mistake in early career is to think that hardwork = high growth, but that’s not actually true. We need to ensure that the 1000 hours that we put in are high quality.
Meaning? With each line of code, we should get better and better.
1000 line of copy-pasta code won’t bring us anywhere. But 1000 line of well constructed, impactful code can improve our technical capabilities and influence in the codebase.
Same goes for our day to day work, putting in 40 hours every week doesn’t magically make us a senior engineer or tech lead. With all the hours put in, we want to get feedback and improve our craft.
And through 1-1 meetings, we can get feedbacks and things to work on to improve the next 40 hours that we spend on our work.
Relationship Growth
1-1 meetings are not all just about work at the company or reaching your career goals. It’s also a conversation between two individual, sharing thoughts and problems and brainstorm it together.
It’s a great opportunity for you to know more about your manager and build a good rapport.
The friendship you have can extend beyond the workplace, even if you or your bosses leaves the company.
Who knows you might start a new company together or work together again in the future.
The What of 1-1
After reading all these, you are now keen to start practicing doing 1-1 meetings. What can you do?
If you’re a manager
Schedule a 30 minute weekly session (during office hours) with your direct report. Preferably using Calendar app like Google Calendar.
The goal should be:
Understanding his/her current condition
What are their goals
How you can help them achieving their goals at the company
Feedback on their recent performance
Giving honest and candid feedback is important so that one can work on fixing the issues before it get worsen.
If one is performing well and getting promoted, it should not surprise him/her because these good feedbacks should already addressed during the 1-1s. Same goes for those that are lacking in performance.
If you’re an individual contributor
Schedule a 30 minute weekly session (during office hours) with your manager. Preferably using Calendar app like Google Calendar.
The goal should be:
Sharing your recent problems at work (What are the solutions you are trying out)
Getting feedback on how you can resolve the problems
Career goals, aligning expectations and work towards it at the company
Usually I will prep some questions or topics that I want to talk about during the 1-1 to maximise the gains out of it.
For example, I might talk about startup side of things to my COO and talk about system designs to my tech lead.
How I am running my 1-1s
I always keep a journal with me, writing down all my 1-1s so I can review back and reflect when needed.
Others uses tools like Notion or Excel to keep track of it, here’s a great resource on how you can run 1-1s on Excel by Jeff Su.
Conclusion
1-1 meetings are really game changing to one’s career growth and you would not want to miss out the opportunities from doing so.
It will be hard if such culture doesn’t exist in the company, but I believe that we can start small, taking the smallest steps.
Doing it in a smaller circle, spreading the influence across the company. It will prove itself with time if it’s providing values.
Feel free to reach out and talk more!
Very fascinating read