Deconstructing Manager One on Ones
Rands in Repose has done a great series on Deconstructing Managers recently where he touches on one-on-ones.
Managers who don’t have a plan to regularly talk to everyone on their team are deluded. They believe they are going to learn what is going on in their group through some magical organizational osmosis and they won’t. Ideas will not be discovered, talent will be ignored, and the team will slowly begin to believe what they think does not matter… and the team is the company.
Stronger terms than I’d probably use, but after about 5 months now doing weekly one-on-ones with 8 direct reports I’m not about to stop doing them. I still learn things every week that I used to think I’d pick up on.
I sit in a cube in the midst of most of my team with the exception of a few who are collocated on another project in another building. I often don’t find out how frustrated someone is with a particular technology problem or political issue until the one-on-ones. As everyone’s gotten more comfortable with them they’ve been able to explain why they’re frustrated and I can attempt to solve the problem.
Another thing I’ve noticed is several developers are realizing they can bring up questions around architecture and design in the one-on-ones and get my feedback. We’ve started to do more whiteboarding around how we’re architecting some of our web applications. That way they can check out their approaches on at least a weekly basis with someone outside the project team.
If you’re still debating getting started just do it. I stalled for at least a year after I ran across the idea of weekly one-on-ones.
I’ve implemented Scrum in my team about 3 months ago, and I’ve been reading about one-on-ones for quite some time, but as I am the ScrumMaster I have been thinking that doing Scrum with my team each day and then do one-on-one once a week might be a bit to much. Any take on that? Are you functioning as a ScrumMaster as well?
Well the focus of a daily Scrum and a one-on-one is pretty different. The daily Scrum gives someone say 90 seconds to update you and isn’t likely to involve them explaining say a personal situation at home. The one-on-one is an open forum for them to bring up any sort of thing, though it may overlap with some status on the project you already attend daily Scrums for.
I thought about the time committment with one-on-ones as well and held off, but I’ve come to see it’s worth it at least in my situation. Your situation may be a bit unique, but you could always start the experiment with every other week one-on-ones. I’d try weekly and then adjust to every other week if it seemed like overkill.
I am a ScrumMaster on one project with a few of my folks, and I attend a daily Scrum about 50% of the time on another project with four of my developers. It’s nice to get the daily updates, but the one-on-one is a different sort of forum and it’s a nice touchpoint for coaching and mentoring as well. Additionally I find it helps me with remembering to give feedback at least once a week with everyone, as I’m still developing my skills on giving feedback all the time.
Thank you, Ed. That makes very much sense.
Ed, IMO PM and Scrum Master are really two roles and team members relate to the individuals in those roles differently. Even so, most companies today do not explicitly staff a Scrum Master position at all. Instead, the PM is expected to play that role in addition to the usual PM duties. There seems to be a natural tension between relating to a team member as his/her manager and relating to him/her as a process facilitator / agile mentor. What have you found most challenging in trying to function in both roles simultaneously for the same teams?
I posted a response to this at http://edgibbs.com/2006/06/19/scrummaster-versus-functional-manager/ .