Use These 5 Topics to Energize One-On-Ones
Use the following topics and questions to energize one-on-ones.
One-on-ones show people they matter.
5 Topics to Energize One-on-Ones:
#1. Safety and Security:
Questions:
- How secure do you feel in your role or within the team?
- What aspects of working here increase your confidence?
- What could you do to elevate your sense of safety and security?
- What can I do to help?
2. Connection and Belonging:
Questions:
- What helps you feel connected to people?
- How connected do you feel to the team, to co-workers?
- What could you do to strengthen those connections?
- How could we create an environment where feeling connected is more likely?
#3. Achievement and Growth
Questions:
- On a scale of 1:10 how challenged do you feel in your role?
- What types of challenges most energize you?
- Where would you enjoy contributing more?
- How would you like to develop? If you grew in that way, what would be different for you?
#4. Purpose and Meaning:
Questions:
- What are the meaningful contributions you make here? (This might feel accusatory to insecure employees. Explain the purpose of the question.)
- How does your role give you opportunities to express your values?
- What brings you the most fulfillment?
#5. Joy and Curiosity:
Questions:
- What parts of your job energize you? How can we maximize them?
- What parts of your job drain you? How can we minimize them?
- What are you curious about as it relates to your job or working here?
Use these five themes to help employees enrich their work life. Be supportive, but remember you are not responsible for making someone feel a certain way. Your role is to create a positive environment, not to manage everyone’s feelings.
What makes one-on-ones energizing? Draining?
Still curious:
Quick Strategies to Energize One-On-Ones
A Simple Reusable One-On-One Plan
Make the Most of Your One-on-One Meetings (hbr.org)
I appreciate maintaining these conversations throughout the year and integrating the evolution of the conversations into the annual performance review. In training new supervisors how to conduct meaningful evaluations, I suggest that they create documentation that will be treasured by the person being supervised. I will keep this outline as a great reference for this process. Thank you!
Love this Dawn. “… documentation that will be treasured by the person.” Wow!
Glad you found something useful.
What makes one-on-ones energizing?
When they add value and help people learn, grow, and succeed. Discuss key accomplishments and strengths, new insights and lessons learned, new challenges and opportunities, what other top performers are doing, etc. Balance the discussion on the hard data (facts and data) and soft data (emotions and feelings).
What makes one-on-ones draining. When they lack substance, waste time, and the boss talks about all the great things he/she is doing. When the focus is only on the key metrics that are behind plan.
Wonderful insights, Paul. A negative focus drains people. It’s easy to fall into.
I appreciate you consistently bringing value.
Thank you for these. I just sat with them and rewrote them to use in my context as a pastor. I don’t have staff, but I have members. Some of them are highly engaged and others are not. Good questions to get to the heart.
Thanks for jumping in today, Pete. And thanks for sharing an application of this content.
Most appreciated your suggestion about talking less and listening more, That coupled with thoughtful questions and patient waiting for responses adds such value to one-on -ones. As a spiritual leader ,like Pete, I can use some of these questions for one on ones with members of both our board and our community.
Pauline