The One-on-One: Part Two
You’ve started by asking your team member “What did you Love at work this week?” And this gave you an opportunity to learn about what lights their fire.
Now it’s time to learn what suffocates it.
As with Question One, there are multiple iterations of this question that can really help illuminate realities both for you and for your team member. It can get monotonous answering the same question each week. And, it’s really easy to slip into auto-pilot when answering. So changing it up keeps the answers from becoming as dull as the questions.
Here are a few alternates.
- What did you hate this week?
- What could have gone better this week?
- Where did you see room for improvement in the team this week?
- Where did you think you could have done better this week?
- What was monotonous and boring?
- What do you wish you didn’t have to do as part of your job?
- Where did you notice yourself procrastinating or putting off a task for later?
In addition to learning what kinds of things stifle your team member’s spirit, this is also an opportunity for them to self-coach, in a sense.
The truth is, we all know what we do wrong. It eats us up inside!
So instead of being that manager always ready to provide “just in time feedback” (aka ready to tell people what they’re doing wrong), be the manager who listens and allows your team members safety and space to talk about their own shortcomings and to own and learn from their mistakes. Be encouraging in that process. Offer resources to help them grow on their journey. It can hurt to admit these things out loud.
And remember, it is a journey! The idea of employees having strengths and weaknesses doesn’t help anyone. Rather, allow people to identify where they shine, and where they want to learn to shine. We are all working on mastering something. And if you’re not, if you think you’ve got it all together:
- You don’t.
- You’re the problem.
Look out for my next post in the series, The One-on-One: Part Three.
Follow the entire One-on-One Series here.
