The Effective Manager, 2nd Edition

4Get to Know Your People—One on Ones

The most important behavior a manager can engage in is getting to know her people. Manager Tools recommends you hold One on Ones (O3s) with each of your directs to get to know them.

We recommend O3s because we have never found any other behavioral tool that improves trust faster than our present form of them. Every time we compared Manager Tools O3s (MTO3s) against any other managerial behavior, MTO3s have won soundly. No matter how much you talk to your people, no matter how much you think you know them, no matter how many team meetings you have, or electronic surveys you conduct, we have never found a faster, more robust tool for building trust than MTO3s.

Many managers (including us, before we learned about the power of MTO3s) don't like this recommendation. Managers already have too much to do, and too many meetings, to be adding more meetings and more time on their calendar. But the trust you build with your directs more than makes up for the time you'll spend in your MTO3s. You'll be interrupted less, you won't have to check up on as much, you'll see problems coming before they blow up, and you'll make changes proactively rather than reactively.

We've seen this ourselves and heard this from so many thousands of managers over the years, we have a standing guarantee: if you follow our guidance on how to do them, you will get more time back in your calendar than you spend in your MTO3s. Whether you have two directs or 15, once you have ...