At work, I am navigating the middle management rung of the corporate ladder. My job requires managing up, down, and sideways. The quarterly 1:1 check in document is a tool I use to align my teams work towards meaningful outcomes for business customers and share holders.
Every quarter, I ask people to write, share and review (with me) a document with answers to the following questions:
- What outcomes (in the past quarter) were delivered for the business
and users?
- Force engineering leaders to shed some of the technical baggage, put on their business hat, and become empathetic to the users of their programs.
- Provide quantifiable measures for meaningful outcomes. For example, instead of stating a win of having 3 software updates, but rather, released a complex feature used by 30% of users.
- What went well?
- Discuss the role of people involved in making those outcomes possible, as this helps us understand our allies.
- Discuss decisions that helped make the outcome, and what led to making them. Identify and call out helpful patterns for future use.
- What could have gone better?
- Understand what was the miss, was it our execution, hypothesis, or dependencies that caused us to have a sub optimal outcome.
- What learning’s do we can keep in mind as we go forward.
- What outcomes are planned for next quarter?
- Discuss in depth plans, milestones, collaboration, and communications for the upcoming quarter.
- Whose support is required for this?
- Personally, what can I do to help the leader succeed?
The format and content of the document can give the impression that it is a summary of project execution and planning.
In practice, it leads to great in-depth conversations about people who help us execute (both direct and in other organizations). Gaps in our assumptions, skills and or resources become clearer, relationships are strengthened or forged, new information is sought out (sometimes about why we are doing something), and learning is built, and clarifies shared context.
This learning can also lead to improvement proposals that can then be shared with people up or sideways in the management chain. A recent example that comes to mind: I recently identified and proposed a different approach in solving for 1st party application developers.