Chapter 6 – Meet Your Employees /Reportees/ Associates
1.1 What should be covered in my meeting with my employees?
The Group Meeting:
As soon as possible, plan to meet with your unit as a group to get acquainted. It is crucial in setting the tone of your relationship. Some points to cover in the group meeting:
- Discuss your first order of business and ask for their help.
- Tell them that you will meet with them individually.
Individual Meetings:
Individual meetings provide an excellent opportunity to prove that you are interested in each employee as a unique person. These individual meetings may be done after the group meeting. If the team is large, you might want to pick your team’s critical members and start having one-to-one meetings. If you have a small group, make it a point to meet all the members individually.
- Focus your attention on understanding their key roles, responsibilities and assignments
- Enquire about their business and career aims, specific areas of interest,
- Be curious about any critical issues they may be handling.
- Look for any issues or problems on which you can take prompt action.
- Remember to listen, suspending your judgement
This can start your reputation as a responsive leader.
1 – Review the Department’s Mission and Aims.
Akin to your manager’s meeting, you would review with your department’s aims and the KPIs. This would be a formal way in which you be communicating your objective and outcomes with the team
- Give all your employees a copy of your KPI to stress the unit’s aim and to enable them to align their KPI commitments.
- Stress the organisation’s area of focus.
- Ensure that every employee is aware of the organisation and unit financial commitments.
2 – Review the Employee’s KPIs.
As we saw in the earlier chapter, KPIs are central to your success. Similarly, you may want to ensure that your employees have absolute clarity on expected outcomes and what they need to do.
Their KPIs must be aligned with yours.
- In the first meeting, discuss KPIs, in general, to understand each employee’s assignment and help set up a rapport.
- In a later meeting, ensure that each employee’s KPIs is aligned with the unit’s aims.
- Establish boundaries of authority for responsibilities, assignments, and tasks.
- Discuss any personnel issue.
3 – Review the Employee’s IDP.
This is one of the most crucial steps that a new manager must focus on in the transition. Akin to you having the individual development plans that help you chart your career, every employee in your team too aspires and has personal development goals.
Your predecessor may or may not have focused on them. You will do an excellent service to yourself if you help your team in their development plan.
Ensure that each employee has a current Individual Development Plan.
- IDP is critical to both the company’s and individual’s success.
- Individually discuss their short- and long-term career goals with your employee and ensure that their IDP is aligned with their goals.
- Discuss the employee’s assignment and the skills needed to do that job.
- Ask the employee to design a plan to develop those skills and close any gaps identified by a skill assessment.
- Show your support. Inspire a shared vision, encourage individuals to set high, yet attainable goals.
- Have clarity on how their development plans to align with business and individual objectives.
- Enable them to achieve their goals by providing meaningful work and development opportunity and always ‘walk the talk,’ modelling how to ensure a continuous learning environment.
4 – Clarify Expectations.
Establish ground rules for how you will work together. Chart out on:
- the most effective way to communicate with each other
- how to manage work/life balance issues
- preferences for handling recognition and reward
- feedback requirements
- individual motivations
5 – Schedule Regular Employee/Manager Meetings
As you would with your manager, you would need to schedule a regular one and one or checkpoint meetings with your direct reports. Such regular meetings help you see if your team is aligned and do a course correction when all other checks and balances in the system fail. Usually, these meetings with clear the blind spots.
- Schedule regular employee/manager meetings over three months.
- Decide on the mutually agreeable frequency and content
- Including time for KPI and IDP updates and Fit for You discussions.
- Be conscious of the frequency and duration of these meetings. While meetings are essential, they must not become a mundane routine with no value add. If you see less value, decrease the frequency. If you see more blind spots in each meeting, increase the frequency.