Two Warning Signs That Your One-On-One Meetings With Employees Are Failing

Hi, Mark Murphy here, and I want to give you 2 quick signs that one-on-one meetings with your employees are not going so well. Okay, first, one-on-one meetings with employees should be the backbone of every employee engagement, employee retention kind of effort. They are a vital part of this. However, far too many leaders are not doing a great job with them right now. In fact, we know from one of our studies, only 20% of employees say that my leader is taking an active role in helping me grow and develop, like, you know, through one-on-one conversations. By contrast, 29% of of employees say, my leader rarely or never is helping me grow and develop. Okay, so we need to be using one-on-one conversations, you know, coaching, mentoring, developing, growing, all of that to really help drive this issue. But there are two big signs that these conversations just aren't working, that they're not deep enough, they're not meaningful enough. Okay, sign number one, you should be hearing about employee frustrations. In these conversations. Yes, we're doing growth, we're doing development. When we're having a one-on-one conversation, we really want to focus on helping them grow and develop, reach their full potential. But part of that is understanding not just what motivates this person, what makes them tick, but it's also understanding what demotivates them. Because how are you going to help somebody grow if you don't know exactly what's burning them out, what's frustrating them, what's sucking the life and energy out of them? So Warning sign number 1 is that we're not actually hearing about the frustrations and deep motivations. Now, as you know from some of our training programs and all my books and all the rest, we practice a model we call shoves and tugs. Tugs are the things that tug at you to stay. They're your motivators. Shoves are the things that shove you out the door. Those are your demotivators. Now, one of the classic questions that we teach for Assessing this is asking an employee, could you tell me about a time in the past month or two where you got really frustrated or demotivated? That is one of the fastest and easiest ways to surface what is really frustrating and burning out an employee. And if you get an answer to that question— A, you have to ask it, but B, when you get an answer to it, you are going to instantly learn unbelievable amounts about what's really causing this person to not reach their full potential. Another way you can ask this is to focus on specifically frustrations. So a lot of the research we've been doing lately about people's frustrations at work, we've discovered that around 60% of people, plus or minus, say that the frustrations they face at work are so severe that it's making them want to look for another job. Okay, so frustrations are, are high, right? There's a lot of annoyance and frustrations at work. One way you can address the frustration side of this directly is to ask an employee some version of, are there any frustrations you have at work right now that you think are within my control as your manager to fix? Basically what we're asking is, are there things bugging you right now that you think I could do something about? Which is one of the surest, fastest ways to figure out how much is this frustration going to chase somebody out the door. If there's a frustration that they don't think you can do much about, they're a bit more likely to accept that and say, well, you know, okay, that's just kind of part of things right now. But if they have a frustration, a serious frustration that they think you can do something about and you're not doing something about it, oh, that is going to boil up a lot faster and become a real serious problem in this. So number one warning sign that your one-on-ones aren't working as well as they should be is we're not surfacing the frustrations that people feel. We're not even asking about the frustrations that people are feeling. Warning sign number 2, though, is if we do ask the question, we don't get real answers. So when you ask a question about somebody's demotivators or the frustrations, there are usually 4 levels of answers you could potentially get. There's the superficial, the suspicious, the involved, and the committed. The superficial answer is when somebody says, nah, I don't have any demotivators, no frustrations, everything's good, just perfect. Okay, 99 times out of 100, that's, that's not actually true. Most of us could point to at least something, even if we We love our jobs. There's still something we could point to that we go, okay, yeah, you know, that thing is kind of a frustration. So if we're getting a superficial answer, usually a bad sign. Suspicious answers, when they say something like, you know, I suppose there are some frustrations. Why do you want to know? Which is akin to them saying, what, is this going to go on my, you know, permanent record? It's basically saying, yeah, I have frustrations. I'm just I'm not sure I trust you to do something positive with the answer. Then we get to the involved answer, which is when people say, yeah, there's a frustration right now. Well, let me tell you what it is. But it's usually done at a higher level, and it usually doesn't involve the manager. The deepest level of sharing frustrations or demotivations is the committed answer, when an employee says, you know what, I do have a frustration, and it's this thing that you, as my boss, did last week. Let me tell you specifically what it was that you did that caused me to be so demotivated. That, even though that is one of the scariest answers that a leader can get, it's because they don't realize that that's one of the best answers a leader can get. When an employee trusts you enough to tell you exactly what demotivated them and even tell you that the thing that demotivated them was you, oh my gosh, this is great. And I know that sounds weird, right? Because like, we shouldn't want people to be demotivated. Well, people do have demotivators, whether we like it or not, they exist. The key is whether or not they trust us enough as their leaders to actually tell us what they are and share with us openly and candidly so that we could actually fix it. So what do you do with all of this? Well, number one, you gotta be on the lookout for these two warning signs. If you're not asking about frustrations and demotivators, you need to be. Otherwise, it sounds nice that you're having one-on-one conversations, but you're probably not getting anywhere near deep enough in these conversations. And if you're a CEO an HR executive, et cetera, you wanna make sure that every leader that reports to you is getting deep in these conversations. Second thing is really pay attention to whether you're getting meaningful, deep, and robust answers. If it turns out that a lot of your employees are giving superficial answers, for example, or suspicious answers, you cannot turn around and try and beat a better answer out of 'em. You have to tell me right this second what's really demotivating you, because the employee's likely to say, This, this conversation right here, this is what's demotivating me. Instead, what you have to do is take the people— if you have 10 employees, for example, at least 2 or 3 of them are going to give you really deep, meaningful, robust answers. Take that, word will start to spread. So when you do this conversation again next month, now you'll get 3 or 4 or 5 really motivated, deep, robust answers. Do it again the next month, you're going to get up to 6 or 7. Really deep, meaningful answers. So it's just going to take a little bit of time to build your way up. But if you pay attention to these two warning signs, make sure you are asking about frustrations, and at the same time really listening carefully to the answers that people are giving you, this will radically transform the quality of the one-on-ones. Step one, of course, is just having one-on-ones. But the next big step, the real kind of gold standard of this, is making sure these conversations are truly deep and meaningful. One last note: companies generally hire us to add a little spark to their leadership training and frankly give their managers skills that nobody else is teaching them, whether it's hiring for attitude or managing narcissists or giving tough feedback without making people angry or things like goal setting for greatness, not mediocrity, and all the rest. If you would like to add a little oomph to your organization's leadership training, schedule a call with us. We can give you a quick overview of our training options, whether it's live and in person or online and on demand. No obligation, just a quick chat, and we'll give you some options to consider. I look forward to chatting.