Jenny Cole on Why You Should Be Finding Time for 1 - 1 Meetings

Jenny Cole: 1:02

Hello and welcome to Positively Leading the Podcast. I'm your host, enny Cole. I'm the CEO of Positively Babying, and it's so lovely to have you here. This is one of my solo episodes, so I do not have a guest today. My solo episodes often come from issues that have arisen from my coaching clients or the teams that I work with in schools, and this one's a biggie.

Jenny Cole: 1:35

I've spent quite a bit of time this year supporting senior leaders to do poor performance processes with difficult staff members. Just to be clear, I do not support the poor performer, nor do I make a judgment about the performance of the poor performer. My role as coach is to support the leader, so they are quite often just going through the processes that their system has asked them to go through the compliance processes, the poor performance process, and working with labour relations or standards and integrity or HR, depending on their system and this is a gut-wrenching awful process for everybody involved because by the time we have got to this point, the poor performance has often gone on for too long and it's almost impossible to do anything about. It's impossible to remediate the performance and we know it's often impossible to get rid of that person, and sometimes that person started off as a pretty decent employee and lost their way, and it's so sad to often see people at the end of their careers really struggling to prove their worth. There is nothing lovely about that process. I would like to suggest a way that we can not get to that point. What has often happened is that some other leader prior to the one that I'm coaching has been negligent in the way that they have supported that person, or at least not held them accountable, and so by the time it falls in the lap of the leader with high integrity, it's often gone too far.

Jenny Cole: 3:40

So the tool I'm going to suggest that is good for everybody, not just our poor performers. In fact, it's good for everybody, not just our poor performers. In fact, it's good for everybody because it strengthens relationships and trust and it progresses the personal and business goals of the organisation. The tool is regular one-to-one meetings In the corporate sector my corporate clients. It's really very usual for them to meet at least fortnightly, but often weekly, with their boss, but also likewise with their direct reports, and these are formally informal meetings where the employer gets to talk to their line manager about what's going on for them in their role as a leader. It is such an awesome opportunity to coach and develop your people. It's such a lovely proactive way of working. It is much more efficient than the reactive way we get to coach people forward. We get to give them some affirming feedback if something's successful. We get to give them some course correcting feedback or suggestions if they're a little bit off track and, importantly, we keep a nice firm grip on the pulse of wellbeing in the organisation, both individually and also in teams.

Jenny Cole: 5:12

But you're going to say I don't have time to do one-on-one meetings with everyone in my organisation, and I agree you do not. I want you, particularly senior leaders, to just focus on the people that sit directly below you. So if you're a principal, these are your deputies or your associate principals. It might include your business manager. Even in the biggest school, this would not be more than seven people, those seven people underneath. I want you to look at the people you directly line manage. Ideally in most organisations, this probably shouldn't be between more than seven to 10 people.

Jenny Cole: 5:56

I know in education that sometimes it's a great deal more, but if we can divide up the responsibility for these meetings so that we've got no more than 10 people, it is absolutely doable. I've just done a little bit of the maths. There's 40 weeks a year. Give or take in a school year. If we met fortnightly with our direct reports, that's 20 weeks at half an hour per person. That's 10 hours per person. And let's imagine that we do have 10 direct reports, that is 100 hours and over the course of the year where we are having one-on-one conversations with the people that we manage and again I acknowledge that feels like a lot, but you go back to your colleagues who are trying to deal with poor performance. The number of hours devoted to trying to fit something that is already broken is unbelievable and the stress that it creates is phenomenal. Wouldn't we prefer to put those hundred hours into ensuring that we get the very best out of the people that we line manage? I certainly would. I would certainly prefer to have regular, proactive, positive coaching conversations with my team than to occasionally have those really tough ongoing Occasionally have those really tough, ongoing, grinding hard conversations where people have really lost their way.

Jenny Cole: 7:33

So let's assume you're going to have one-on-one conversations with your team members. Let's think about some of the things that we would have to be aware of before we launch into this. First of all, we need to be clear about who it is that we line manage, so very clearly dividing up the people and assuring them that this is the person that you are going to be having regular conversations with and this is your line manager. It's a good chain of command, but also a chain of communication. Then get really clear on the responsibilities of the members of your team, and I'm just going to talk about the executive team for a moment.

Jenny Cole: 8:20

Again, this is sometimes easier than in high schools. The operational deputy is responsible for timetables and operational things, and there might be a kind of HR deputy or pastoral care or curriculum deputy, slightly trickier, in primary schools. So, for example, in a primary school, you might have a K-3 deputy and a 4-6 deputy who do all of the curriculum and all of the pastoral care for their year groups. This is going to make it really hard for you to manage what it is that they do and to get good information. Not impossible. It's absolutely fine to set up your school like that.

Jenny Cole: 9:06

I think there's another layer, though, which is I think it's absolutely fine to set up your school like that. I think there's another layer, though, which is I think it it's about looking at your business plan, your school improvement plan, your strategic plan, looking at the targets over the life of that plan. So you'll have key areas that you're focusing on and then there will be targets underneath them. Those targets need to have names next to them, because that person might not be doing the work, but you want to know what it is that they're responsible for. That's more a KPI kind of approach, like businesses. So in business you have very clear KPIs. These are the key groups of things that I am responsible for and I think we need to get better at this, particularly in primary schools, because then we can have meetings specifically about what people are responsible for.

Jenny Cole: 10:00

But if you're a deputy managing a teacher, that teacher is responsible for ensuring that we are following the strategies outlined in the business plan, as well as the other things that they're responsible for. But if you've got a whole school focus on a particular pedagogy, then that's what you're having conversations around, as well as the general day-to-day management and teaching in their classrooms. Whatever it is. People want to know what their job is, what what they're responsible for and how they'll be judged. Not that these meetings are necessarily about being judged, but we want to know where's our piece of the pie, what's the bit that we can make the most difference in?

Jenny Cole: 10:50

And then there's the interplay between people's personal goals their personal professional goals and the goals of the business. Even if you're not necessarily responsible for doing someone's performance management, you want to know what people's personal goals are so that you can help them achieve it. Basically, so, if you've got a real focus on structured literacy and you are focusing on the literacy block, we want to know what people's personal goals are around, how they're going to improve their teaching strategies and performance to meet the requirements of the literacy block. And that might not necessarily be about professional learning, that could be. They just need to get more organised so that their literacy block takes 40 minutes instead of 140 minutes. Either way, that's what we need to do prior to these meetings Get clear on who our direct reports are, get clear on what their responsibilities are, their accountabilities, and understand their personal development needs and their personal goals.

Jenny Cole: 11:55

Then we've got five things that we need to consider. I'm going to read them out and then I'm going to talk about them one by one. We need to get the venue right. We need to get the timing right. We need to be clear on the scope of these meetings, what's included and what's not, the tone of these meetings and the actions and outcomes as a result of these meetings. So let's dive back into those Venue. It's remarkably important that the venue helps us to build trust, allows us to have trusting relationships and open and honest conversations.

Jenny Cole: 12:41

And so if you're a simulator in the school, inviting someone into your office and sitting them on the other side of the desk does not say trust me, it says power imbalance. If you're managing the cleaners and gardeners, it might be absolutely appropriate for you to take these conversations walking, going for a wander around the school or sitting in the cleaner's office, for example. If going off site occasionally to have these meetings over a cup of coffee is what's needed, then that's what's needed. At the minimum, you need to try and find a neutral space, and if you can't find a neutral space in a school I know many primary schools struggle to find a meeting room then find time to go and sit in the teacher's classroom or the other person's space. Number two timing. I recommend that you just schedule these meetings as many as you can, as far in advance as you can, that they're in your diary and they're there and they're privileged and they don't get overtaken by other things.

Jenny Cole: 13:43

Of course, there will always be things that do need to take precedent. However, I want you to be able to push back and say I understand that that's a good time for that particular meeting, but I've got a one-on-one with Michael from year three, because people are the most important assets. They are our most expensive asset and if we say no, this is not important. Something else is important. Most of the time they'll shrug their shoulders, but if you've cancelled a couple of times on people, they'll stop trusting that they are the most important thing in the building. So, also, some meetings are going to take longer than others. Some people are going to take longer than others. Some people are going to be fine with a 15-minute check-in. Half an hour is probably ideal In the beginning, or if you're doing goal-setting meetings, it might take a little bit longer. So consider the timing. Start with half an hour and see how you go. Third one is scope. I will talk in my next podcast about some tools that you can use, but these meetings can cover a whole gamut of important topics.

Jenny Cole: 14:56

But I think we should be looking at progressing people's goals, growing people and, as I said earlier. What are their goals? What are they working towards? What are the goals of the organisation? What skills, competencies, mindsets do people need in order to meet the school development goals? The most important reason is to give people feedback. Affirming feedback that's great. Do more of that. That seems to be working. I love those results there. Lots and lots of affirming feedback. Our young and new staff are going to need far more affirming feedback. Our veterans less so.

Jenny Cole: 15:37

But corrective feedback, which is that in the moment, feedback that we say we seem to have got a bit off track here or we seem to have a bit of a delay or a speed bump, how can we get back on track? Or the sort of feedback that says that's not working as well as we'd like it to. Let's try something different. Corrective feedback is so important. It's not okay to set a goal in May and then get to September for a review meeting and realize that we have gone completely off track. You only need to deviate by 1% every week for 10 weeks to be 10 degrees or 10 percent off track if we're not meeting frequently. So frequent meetings allow us to build trust and relationships which allow us to give feedback that says this is not working the way it could do. I'm wondering if we could try something different and get people off track, those poor performers that I talked about. It's not okay to let someone go for 25 years and then tell them that they're not doing a good job.

Jenny Cole: 16:47

The scope of these meetings could include goals feedback. It could include people's development plans and, in fact, I really encourage you to have performance management and performance development as part of this regular cycle. They might be more formal meetings, but they need to be in there and once you know what people's goals and development plans are, you can ensure that you keep them on track and support them to meet their goals. Importantly, it gives us a really good opportunity to take the temperature of well-being, to take the pulse of well-being with our team. We want to know if people are feeling a little bit under the pump, if they're feeling under pressure, if they're feeling really challenged, if they're feeling awesome and could probably take on some more. We want to know that and we're only going to know that if we're talking to them regularly. But these are coaching conversations backwards and forwards, so it's not just about checking up on people. It's about giving people an opportunity to ask you questions, to ask you for ideas, to give you suggestions, to give you some feedback and to share backwards and forwards about what's going on for them.

Jenny Cole: 18:02

This is a dialogue, so the three elements we've covered already getting the venue right, getting the timing right, deciding on the scope and it's going to be different for different contexts determining the tone. And my advice would be that these are informal meetings. They're scheduled, they're deliberate, but the tone is informal. So people will often ask do I have to have minutes for these? And my suggestion is no. There are AI tools, such as Otter, that I use, that helps us collect meeting information. You might choose to do that with the permission of the person that you're talking to, but at the very least, all I suggest is that you diarise it and that you keep just a note in your notes and they keep a note in their notebook about what you've talked about. If it ever does come to poor performance, you will have a record of meeting with that person, and if you get a sniff that we're moving towards less than fantastic performance, then of course you might start to collect more information and take stronger minutes.

Jenny Cole: 19:23

But I do not want you to have a half an hour meeting and then spend the next three hours typing up minutes. It's absolutely okay to send back an email that says loved our conversation today. These are our actions and outcomes and these are some of the things that we discussed. Dot points. That's enough. It's not part of a formal process, and the last part is agreeing on actions and outcomes. So you can cover an awful lot of ground in these meetings and you want people to walk away with action, clarity and energy. You want them to walk out of that room going. I was heard, I was listened to, that was a great meeting and I've got these actions and outcomes as a result.

Jenny Cole: 20:06

They are the things that need to be recorded, perhaps, or at least agreed upon. I agree to do this bit, you'd agree to do that bit, and we'll check in in our next catch up about how that went. So they're the five things I want you to give some thought to. Where's it going to be held? How long for? What are sort of the things you're going to cover? What's the tone? What do you want people to think when they're meeting with you? Do you want you to feel like it's friendly or informal? We want these conversations to be purposeful. They're not just a chat. We're having conversations about what they are responsible for, but they're not compliance meetings. They're supportive coaching conversations where we might agree on some actions and some outcomes. I'm going to share with you next time, perhaps, some strategies for helping people to reflect and to keep the one-on-one meeting on track. If you would like some suggestions for reflection tools, by all means send me an email and I will happily share with you what I have. I just want you to think about.

Jenny Cole: 21:25

The reason why we have these meetings is that, as human beings, we want to feel like our work matters. We want to feel like our boss knows us, sees us, understands what we do, understands what is important to us and understands where we're at, and by that we are creating a culture where it says you are the most important thing. If you weren't doing your job, we wouldn't progress this, we wouldn't be improving outcomes for kids, and so I'm going to have a conversation about the very important work that you do with you so that I can help you to do it. And I'm not saying collecting people's monkeys, I'm just saying having a coaching conversation where we say what's going on for you, what are your successes, what are some of the challenges and roadblocks that you are having. Is there some way that we can support you to get through that roadblock? Are there any areas that you are focusing on at the moment? Are there any particular groups of students or staff that you are focusing on at the moment and how are you tracking with your wellbeing?

Jenny Cole: 22:45

I think one-on-one meetings are absolutely crucial. As I look back now and as I reflect on many of the coaching conversations I've had, a lot of the problems and issues could have been nipped in the bud or may never have occurred if we'd had regular check-ins with the people that we line manage. Thank you for joining me today. I hope you found that useful, if not useful, at least thought-provoking. If you think that that's something that you would like to try, having more regular one-on-one meetings here is your action. I want you to open your calendar. I want you to look to the next month. I want you to consider the people on your team and see if you can slot in each staff member for just half an hour over the course of that month and then let me know how you go. Thank you for joining me on Positively Leading. I'll see you back here next week.

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