The Blogworld of Poppyfish People Development

We know that if we are to make 1-to-1 meetings a habitual part of our management style then we have to get practising. But how do you get started with 1-to-1’s ? Well, try this.  Next time you are in a meeting with your team tell them that you want to give 1-to-1 meetings a six month trial. Ask each of them to take responsibility to arrange their own 1-to-1 sessions with you. Ideally these will be face to face, once a week, at a regular time if you can. Giving the responsibility for arranging the meetings to the subordinates is a great way to empower them, just make sure that you are honest with them with the booking arrangements and make sure that you honour the meetings. If you don't turn up you are letting them down and they will certainly think less of you for it. How long should each meeting be? Half an hour is fine. A general rule is 10 minutes for them, ten minutes for you and ten minutes for everything else.  Do the meetings need to be in private? Not necessarily.

Trust is one of those core values that we like to hold dear, both at home and at work. Having trust in someone is a liberating feeling, a feeling that we know we are in good hands, no matter what happens. A feeling of something shared. The phrase “Trust me” is the ultimate statement that we use when we have tried almost every other form of reassurance, when we just know everything will be alright. So trust then, is a good thing and most of us want to see more of it. Lose trust and you lose the relationship. Anyone with a failed marriage will tell you that relationships in which trust has been lost are doomed to a miserable future. The curious thing however is that trust, like common sense, isn’t actually all that common. Especially not, it seems, in the world of work. The UK CIPD have recently published the results of a workplace survey claiming that  just over a third (37%) of employees trust their organisation’s senior management. By inference therefore the other 63% do not.