 Use one-on-one meetings to improve the performance of your team and develop your key employees. Research has shown that employees view the one-to-one meetings with their manager as their most important meeting of any week. As a manager, I view my one-to-one meetings with my direct reports as my most important meeting to develop employees and improve performance in the team. Use one-on-one meetings to improve team performance by, firstly, set and maintain clear goals and expectations. Secondly, to prioritise team member work to create more value. Third, to ask questions to discover key blockers and problems. Fourth, to provide praise and corrective feedback. Fifth, to coach and mentor team members so they build valuable skills. Sixth, to use problem solving to develop and assess. And then seventh, focus on making key decisions. I talk through why each is important and how I go about using one-on-one meetings to get the most I can in terms of developing staff. Developing employees in the right way boost team performance. My name is Jess Coles and if you're new here in Hearts.Training shares, people management expertise, resources and courses teaching you how to build higher performing teams. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below as well as video timestamps so do take a look at these. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. I recommend that you book in a one-on-one meeting with each of your direct reports each week. I find that booking an hour for each meeting is usually enough for both parties to get lots of value from the meeting. For most of you, that is up to seven hours of meetings which, although a serious time commitment, I view as essential in creating a higher performing team. The first way to use one-on-one meetings to develop employees and improve performance is by setting and maintaining clear goals and expectations. It still amazes me that despite goal setting being a favourite topic of management training and research, so many managers don't spend enough time creating clear goals and checking on progress towards achieving those goals. Goals should be smart as much as possible. It takes time to create clear goals even for experienced managers. If you or the other person are not 100% clear on when the goal is being achieved, you should go back to the drawing board. Once you've set goals, you can't forget about them. Bring up progress against goals regularly in your one-on-one meetings. This gives you a great opportunity to assess progress and more importantly help the team member improve their progress by helping and coaching them. Use your one-on-one meetings to reinforce behavioural expectations by displaying the behaviours you want to encourage personally and discussing examples of good and bad behaviour as needed. To develop employees, ask them to work with you to create goals and expectations. Tell them the end goal and then coach them through how they're going to achieve that goal, what milestones they should include and what problems they might encounter. Get them thinking and making decisions to practice their problem-solving skills. The second way to use one-on-one meetings to improve performance is by prioritising team member work to create more value. In your one-on-one meetings, to develop employees, talk them through the top activities and projects for how the team creates the most value for the business and explain why. When your direct reports understand the priority of tasks, activities and projects that the team can use to create value, they will be more likely to prioritise their work in the best value-creating way. You and your team only have a set amount of time. The more time you spend on the most valuable activities, the higher the performance of your team. The more your team members prioritise to create value, the less work you have to do to prioritise these activities instead of them. Make the time to think about what your team does that is most valuable through to the least valuable. I usually start with a company strategy, then move on to functional or business-unit goals and then see what has the biggest impact of revenues, profits and cash generation. Each team will impact each of these directly or indirectly, including supporting functions. Focus the team on creating the most value they can through doing more of the higher value activities and saying no to the lower value activities. The third way to use one-to-one meetings to improve performance is by asking questions to discover key blockers and problems. I love asking my team members and colleagues questions and then listening carefully. I frame my questions to encourage the other person to educate me, which positions them as the expert. I ask questions to find out what they're doing, what they're working on and then move to trying to find out what their blockers and problems are. An example of the flow of questions could be with each question asking the team member to expand on their previous answer. Firstly, what are your top three priorities for the next two weeks? Second, what areas are likely to pose the biggest challenges or difficulties in progressing XXX to YYY? Third, what about the X process is causing so many delays? Fourth, what is the best solution you can think of to get around these delays? Fifth, if we redesign the process, what would it look like? Use questions to steer the conversation to the key blockers and problems the other person is facing. Once you know what these are, you can work out how you can alleviate or remove these issues. This approach is really powerful on so many fronts in motivating staff, better leveraging their time and efforts, demonstrating your will to help and improve their working life and your effectiveness in doing so, all of which contribute to increased team performance. Use your one-on-one meetings to ask questions and listen to find the blockers and problems your team are dealing with. The fourth way to use one-on-one meetings to develop employees is by providing praise and corrective feedback. To keep employees happy, you should aim to provide praise at least three times more than corrective feedback. You make the effort to look for genuine areas and reasons to praise employees. Positive reinforcement is really powerful and far too many managers don't make enough use of it. When giving corrective feedback in one-on-one meetings, make the time to give specific feedback and make the feedback about decisions, choices and actions or the lack of them. For instance, talking about actions is more factual and a lot less personal than giving your opinion on their ability or personality. Always make the feedback about trying to improve what they do, even if they don't like receiving it and if you've already built enough trust, they will listen to what you say. Who doesn't appreciate that someone trying to help you? Never give corrective feedback to put a person down, criticise without purpose or as a power play or a retaliation for them making your life difficult, etc. Use your one-on-one meetings to celebrate the successes and help them do better next time. Don't forget to ask for feedback and listen carefully to what they tell you without judgement or repercussions. The fifth way to use one-on-one meetings to develop employees is to coach and mentor team members so they build valuable skills. Using one-on-one meetings to coach and mentor your direct reports is one of the best ways to pass on skills, experience and wisdom that you have accumulated. You are in the management position for many reasons. There are so many skills that you can help them develop through coaching and mentoring that will make your life easier as a manager and help to improve team performance over time. Five key examples include firstly, people management skills, secondly, decision-making skills, thirdly, planning and organisation skills, fourth problem-solving skills and fifth communication skills. These skills are all really valuable for nearly every job available. You will have technical and other skills that you can also pass on. In my experience, the more you pass on, the better the team members become, which leads to a higher team performance, which in turn means you get promoted quicker as a manager. A win for you, a win for them and a win for the company. Using the privacy of the one-on-one meetings to help your team members learn and improve. The sixth way to use one-on-one meetings to improve performance is to use problem-solving to develop and assess. Another brilliant way to use your one-on-one meetings with team members is to spend some time solving problems either you are facing or they are faced with. Coaching team members through problems is a great way to further develop their problem-solving skills and get valuable solutions to pressing problems. Using your one-to-one meetings to solve problems also gives you a very accurate picture of their problem-solving skills. You can then delegate problems or tasks or a mixture depending on what is the best for them and the team situation. Ask them to provide their solutions before you start offering yours. You practice your questioning and coaching skills. Spend more time listening than talking. In my experience, having two or more minds working on solutions usually provides a better solution than one person on their own. Develop your facilitation skills by getting others to voice their honest opinions and ideas, challenge participants' thinking and work on providing practical implementable solutions. The seventh way to use one-to-one meetings to improve performance is to focus on making key decisions. Finally, making decisions in one-on-one meetings is a great use of the private time that you have with a team member. You can start by making the decisions and talking them through what you have considered and how you reached your decision. You can then progress to asking them to talk you through their thinking process and what decision they would make. And finally, you can get them making the decisions and only inputting or coaching them if you need to. Being able to share the decision-making amongst the stronger members of the team reduces the pressure and burden on you. Plus, you're developing a key skill in your staff. To facilitate decision-making, create a clear framework on decision-making authority for team members to work within. Use one-on-one meetings to develop employees and their decision-making skills. So in summary, we've gone through seven ways to use one-on-one meetings to develop employees and improve performance in the team. I personally think that managers should be teachers and pass on their skills, experience and wisdom that they've accumulated to team members. This is a great way to create succession plans and free up time and energy to improve your own skills, which in turn leads to faster personal career progress. Create useful, valuable one-on-one meetings with your team members and then you and they will be looking forward to spending their time each week plus you'll be increasing team performance in the process. We've been through, firstly, set and maintain clear goals and expectations. Secondly, to prioritise team members' work to create more value. Third, ask questions to discover key blockers and problems. And fourth, provide praise and corrective feedback. Fifth, coach and mentor team members so they build valuable skills. And sixth, use problem-solving to develop and assess. And finally, focus on making key decisions. If you have any questions on the seven ways to use one-on-one meetings to develop employees and improve performance, please leave them in the comment section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.