The Greatest 1-on-1 Coaching Agenda

Leaders, if you think you have no time to coach, you have it backwards. You have no time because you will not coach. The truth of the matter is most people have not been taught how to do an effective one-on-one coaching session with their team members. And I kid you not, there is a massive difference between the organizations that I coach, if they're doing consistent one-on-ones with their team members and those that are not.

Those that are not are always bottom three in terms of results because that is the glue that holds everything together. When you are trying to execute consistently, you have to have great one-on-one coaching sessions every week with your team members. Now, you know, you might You might have a ton of team members that make that very difficult. That is a problem with management.

We have to work through that. But let's talk about that great one-on-one coaching agenda should look like. So, you know, first of all, we build rapport. We start with good news.

We spend a few minutes getting to know each other. Really simple way to do it. Share personal and professional news. Good news with each other just for a few minutes.

That helps you create commonality. You're going to find that you have things that you have that are in common, things that are different, you'll learn from each other. That's where people build rapport. After that, we're gonna go right into your KPIs and your priorities.

How are you pacing against goal with your numbers? And how are you pacing to complete your priorities on time and correctly? And in that conversation, the most critical thing happens, and this is funny, 'cause you'll have people all the time that say, Hey, an effective one-on-one never cover your priorities and KPIs. Nope, we're gonna do it.

And here's why we do it. Because in those settings, that's where people learn the most about how to align together and manage time. What we have to be able to do is say, you know what, here's what I am going to focus on this week to make sure I nail my priorities, which will in turn help me hit my KPI targets. And here's what I'm not going to do this week.

And that discussion of here's what I'm not going to do this week is really the great debate that occurs in that one-on-one coaching session. I always go back to the great, I got this agenda from my boss back in the day about 20 years ago. It's the same agenda I use with my clients to this day. And that part, that meaty part where we talk about priorities and KPIs.

That's where we would get aligned every week about the most important things we had to work on. I would come in, I'd have my handful, my list of three to four things that were critical, and we would discuss if something new was getting added or getting pulled off or what I was going to do to make sure that I could execute against those most critical things we already agreed to. So take that good next 10 to 15 minutes in that one-on-one working on that, how we're going to get more tightly aligned. The next part of the discussion is how are we doing with living the core values of the organization?

Meaning, is there any areas where that person is struggling with or needs help? Now, a great part of the one-on-one coaching session, and this is what we all need to learn as leaders, is we're there to ask questions, not give them all the answers. This is a two-way street, and it's really a street where we are actually asking questions to see if team members can get their own insights, because if they get their own insights, they're going to learn faster, they're going to pick up things faster, they're going to feel more successful. So in that session, what we're really doing is, you know, we're spending time again initially, as we're going through priorities and KPIs, we're asking them, what are they going to do to get better?

How are they going to meet their goals? What are the things they need to give up to get there? And then we get into part, we talk about core values. And by the way, core values, those are really behaviors.

They are rooted in habit routine, how we treat other people. Those are the things that are usually most critical to people's success, not their capability. And we get into that discussion about, hey, where do you need help living this core value or this core value? How are you doing since our last discussion about this core value?

Where have you excelled? Where do you need help? That's where we really start to get behaviorally aligned as an organization and as team members about how to make sure that we have consistent behavior with our team members and consistent output. And so after we get through that discussion about core values and performance, then we want to talk about where they are with their sort of quarterly growth plan.

And that growth plan can be tied to one thing they want to improve that helps them get better. And you know, you can also during that period of time as the manager, you want to make sure you're getting feedback on areas where you need to grow or you need help, blind corners that you might have or you need some more support. Ask team members how you're doing where they need more support. So they feel like they're fully supported in that meeting and the outcome is when they leave they've gotten, you know, one to two key breakthroughs that help them move the needle that week to get further and further ahead.

What comes out of the great one-on-one are a few things. One, again, it's that alignment I'm in a behavior that is consistent with the core values. And again, yeah, I know there's cynicism out there about companies that don't live our core values. We do that really consistently with my clients.

We strive to do that very consistently and leaders strive to do it as consistently as anyone else does. But even they can sometimes fall victim to not. But that's why they need that great one-on-one as well, as we strive to live the core values consistently. Two, we come out of that with more insights about how we can improve our behavior and our performance to make things even easier on us.

So that we can be better leaders, better employees, better team members. And the outcome is we improve and get better. That's the great one-on-one agenda.