Making the Most of 1-on-1 Meetings

For many founders and managers, regular 1-on-1 meetings often feel like a burden and overhead. They consume time while the results are often unclear. Here I will briefly explain the system we have developed at Wunder Fund, its benefits, and why we like it.

We hold 1-1 meetings once a month. Every team member meets with their direct manager. In preparation for the meeting, the employee fills out a template that serves as the meeting skeleton. During the meeting, we discuss each point allowing the employee to elaborate.

Here is our template:

• Goals
  • What have you succeeded in? What did you do well? What are you proud of?
  • What failures have you encountered? What are you not proud of?
  • What can you do to prevent these failures from recurring?
• Updates
  • KPI
  • What new information have you received from the world? What have you learned?
  • What tasks have drained your energy this month, and which ones gave you energy?
• Issues
  • What tools are you missing to achieve your goals? What do you need but don't have?
• Feedback

  • What have you liked about my actions or the company's actions in general?

  • What would you like to change in my actions, the company's actions, or the organization of processes?

  • What else should we do that we are not currently doing, in your opinion?

    
    

This framework is simple yet powerful. It allows us to have deep, meaningful discussions that can lead to real improvement and growth.

Understand your employee

During the meeting, you need to exchange feedback with the employee and update the goals.

You must cultivate the culture of transparency. To do so, make sure your employees know that they can come to you with bad news or concerns and their opinions will be heard.

Let’s dive into the details.

Gather feedback

Strive to elicit negative feedback. Find out what the employee is not satisfied with, either in the manager's actions or in the company as a whole. Identify blockers that hinder the employee's work.

Understand which types of tasks drain the employee's energy and which ones invigorate them. Do that so you'll be able to organise work in such a way that people do not burn out or suffer any more than necessary.

Welcome negative feedback. You should consistently encourage your employees to express it because, by default, without special efforts, most people tend to suppress it.

Thank the employee after receiving their feedback. If you accept the feedback, strive to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. If you do not accept it, thank the employee and explain why. In any case, the person should feel heard and acknowledged.

Provide feedback to the employee

Tell them what you liked about their actions over the past month. Discuss what you did not like and would like to improve.

Most people tend to focus on the negatives and the employee's mistakes. So, throughout the month, you need to proactively appreciate the things you're grateful for and the things that the employee has done well. In the next article, I will introduce you to a technique called "Daily analysis", which may be helpful. Stay tuned.

Synchronise and update goals

• Ensure that the current goals and tasks are still relevant.

• Summarise the month — what has been done and what has not.

• Discuss and set personal goals for the next month. Team- or company-wide goals are to be set previously during respective meetings.

  
  

At Wunder Fund, we expect team members to get things done. We avoid micromanagement and strive to grant our employees as much freedom as their competence allows. One-on-one meetings provide yet another means to assess which goals have been met, which haven't, and to understand the reasons why.

Meetings management

These 1-1 meetings are best conducted on a single day, scheduled back-to-back, allowing about half an hour to an hour for each. If issues arise that require extensive discussion, schedule a separate call.

If your team has significantly embraced the path of radical transparency, and each member has provided explicit buy-in, all these individual 1-on-1 meetings could be merged into a single team-wide meeting, saving you a lot of time. Otherwise, it’s better not to give negative feedback to a person publicly as this can provoke shame and bitterness.

Conclusion

This structure allows us to make the most of our 1-on-1 meetings, enabling us to understand our team's needs and pain points while also providing actionable feedback.

Of course, this protocol requires an initial level of candor and security. At the same time, regular 1-on-1 meetings act as a positive feedback loop — with each new meeting, your interaction with the employee will become increasingly transparent and honest. By maintaining open lines of communication and focusing on both individual and company goals, we can work together as productively as we can.