Money & Career

Running a One-on-One Meeting

Run weekly one-on-ones that your report actually looks forward to, and that surface problems before they explode.

This course is for members

$9 unlocks every course in the library, this one included, plus a credit to build a topic of your own and at least 10 new courses every month.

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What you will learn about Running a One-on-One Meeting

The 7-day sprint
  1. Whose Meeting It Is. A one-on-one is your report's meeting, not your status update, and that single ownership shift changes everything else about how you run it.
  2. A Structure You Can Reuse. A loose but fixed shape, their topics, your topics, then a look forward, keeps the meeting from drifting into small talk or hardening into a checklist.
  3. Questions That Open Things Up. The quality of a one-on-one is set mostly by the quality of your questions, and specific questions beat open-ended ones almost every time.
  4. Feedback That Lands. Feedback works when it is specific, close in time to the event, and framed around observable behavior and its effect rather than the person's character.
  5. Career and the Longer Arc. A few times a year the one-on-one should zoom out from this week's work to where the person is trying to get to, because nobody raises that on a Tuesday.
  6. Notes, Commitments, and Follow-Through. A one-on-one only builds trust if the things agreed in it visibly happen, which means notes and tracked commitments are part of the meeting, not admin afterward.
  7. Repair, Adapt, and Stress-Test. Adjust the one-on-one to the person and the moment, and use it deliberately when things are tense rather than avoiding it.
The 80/20: the 7 concepts that matter most
  • It is their meeting
  • Reliability beats brilliance
  • Specific questions, then silence
  • Feedback on behavior, close to the event
  • Commitments closed out loud
  • Zoom out on purpose
  • Adapt per person, including in conflict
The core idea, explained like you are 5

A one-on-one is a regular, protected, private channel that exists to move information and trust in both directions, especially the information that would never survive a public meeting or a written update.

Then the quiz and the ladder

10 questions that correct you when you are wrong, and beginner, intermediate, advanced levels, each with a practical exercise.