People naturally include trust and respect in their list of important values. Yet so often, at all levels, people complain that they are missing.

Every human is a sovereign entity and is owned by nobody. Nothing but force can change that. Therefore people will choose to follow only those whom they trust and respect.

Trust and Respect are earned by the consistent correct practice of value-based behaviour, including: -

Treating all others as they would wish to be treated.
Being the behaviour they seek from others.
Listening to what others have to say.
Honouring others right to an opinion.
Honouring all agreements whether written or spoken.
Encouraging and facilitating others to contribute to the shared values vision goal or task.
Recognising and acknowledging others\"achievements.
Owning up to errors and omissions and rectifying them promptly.
Not accepting unacceptable behaviour, yet remaining respectful of the individual.
Distinguishing between respect and popularity.
Ensuring one\"s ego is aligned to the shared values and vision.
Honouring all others\" sovereignty of their self.
Being inclusive.
Not wasting energy on blaming.
Remaining as calm and centred as possible.
Realising that trust and respect is earned by first giving trust and respect.

Whilst the above list may appear difficult to remember and practice, it can be reduced to four particular understandings and thus easier to live. The understandings are: -

\"We each are sovereign entities and no matter what our behaviour is, we are not the behaviour, performance or outcomes, therefore we deserve to be treated respectfully at all times, no matter what.\"

\"Recognise and immediately acknowledge desirable behaviour, performance and outcomes, and do not accept unacceptable behaviour, performance or outcomes.\"

\"You can deal with the unacceptable by asking respectful, timely and appropriate questions that brings acute awareness to the perpetrator and influences remedial behaviour\"

\"Your consistent open respectful behaviour is the central pillar of trust\"

When you show others that you consistently respectfully deal with great as well as unacceptable behaviour, performance and outcomes, they will naturally reciprocate by improving their behaviour, performance and outcomes. Such is the power of trust and respect.

If you have lost the respect of others, they will only follow you because they fear something or someone, and they are unable to be their best. They will not trust you either.

Recovering trust and respect is difficult and yet very achievable and requires the following: -

Courage to do what is necessary.

Owning up to the breach.

Rectifying the breach.

Committing to rebuild trust and respect.

Actively monitoring one\"s own behaviour to ensure trust and respect is not further breached.

Consistent appropriate behaviour that earns trust and respect.

Respect and trust go hand in hand. When they are not present at desired levels, the following are the symptoms in an organization or relationship: -

Withheld and broken communication.
Integrity breaches e.g. disobedience, absenteeism, safety breaches, and lesser performance.
Lowered morale and increased distress.
Departure of talent.

Can you imagine the loss of productivity efficiency and profit directly caused by diminished trust and respect?

Can you imagine the return on investment for proactively improving trust and respect in your workplace?

Are you trusted and respected in your workplace?

What is a one-on-one?

A one-on-one is a meeting between two people to discuss current and future work. This is not a performance review, but rather a regular business discussion about the work. In many cases, it is a regular meeting between a manager and his or her employee, but one-on- ones can also occur between peers, team members, and customers and suppliers . The one-on-one lasts between 30- 60 minutes and is held weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Topics of discussion typically include:

Status of projects.
Status of assignments and tasks.
Barriers and roadblocks.
Changes in the pipeline..
Goals.
Development plans.
Reviews of new procedures or processes.
Idea sharing.
Other general Q&A.

What are the benefits of having regular one-on-ones?

Improved clarity and focus for all parties involved.
Faster identification and removal of roadblocks and barriers.
Improved communication and relationships - better mutual trust and cooperation.
Improved performance to goals.
Improved execution.
Improved focus on development and a greater likelihood to follow through with development plans.

What are the limitations of one-on-ones?

They take time!
Although one-on-ones are held regularly, they should not become substitutions for daily business conversations.
One-on-ones are only as effective as is the conversation - is it open, candid and lively?
When one-on-ones are put off and rescheduled, they lose effectiveness. One-on-ones need to be high on the list of priorities.
Some issues and opportunities should be discussed with the entire team.

Are one-on-ones always leader initiated?

One-on-ones are often initiated my the leader, but it does not have to be this way. Some companies ask employees to take the initiative to schedule one-on-ones.

Ways to make one-on-ones more fruitful, fun, and worthwhile:

1. Meet as often as possible and makes sense. When one-on- ones are spread too far apart, there is too much to cover and the conversation suffers.

2. Schedule one-on-ones for a regular time and day a week and try to keep the schedule. The regimen will ensure that more one-on-ones occur.

2. Establish a regular agenda with some time for ad hoc topics.

3. Take notes and send a follow-up email to confirm what was agreed to. The email should focus on the assignments and agreements, not the nitty gritty of the conversation.

4. Come to the meeting prepared with the information you need to have a good discussion. Bring reports and examples. Try to resolve as much as possible at the one-on-one.

5. Both parties should ask lots of questions and be willing to share fully (as appropriate). If all you do is go over project and task status, the one-on-one will lack oomph and impact. Managers should ask about barriers, challenges, and ideas. Employees should ask for feedback, relevant changes and news, goal performance, upcoming opportunities, and ideas. Both should ask about how they can help the other succeed. Peers should share challenges and ask about ideas, upcoming changes, barriers, and how they can help each other succeed.

6. Periodically, the entire one- on-one should focus on development and career goals. While development may be discussed regularly, it is wise to dedicate some time each quarter to discussing career goals and development. While this may seem most appropriate for the manager/employee one-on- ones, it would be beneficial for peers to discuss their goals as well. Peers can often help each other broaden their skills and experiences.

7. Take time to brainstorm new ideas. Have fun with this! If sharing new ideas is a regular part of the agenda, both parties are more likely to come to the table with ideas to share.

In weekly one-on-ones, you conduct regular, private conversations with each employee to ascertain his or her work status, and then offer the employee some feedback. With this personalized approach, you can get regular updates on project progress, mentor your staff and, if you\"re lucky, you\"ll even get some feedback about your own management work.

Unfortunately, one-on-ones seem to be less than ubiquitous, perhaps because so few managers understand their purpose or how to effectively conduct them. However, they are worth learning about—regularly scheduled one- on-ones can help you sail through the inevitable rough waters that each and every team must navigate to keep projects on course.

Time Is of the Essence

Set a specific one-on-one meeting time each week to talk with each of your employees, and keep that time inviolate. Your staff members are planning to meet with you at that specific time—they may not be ready to meet with you earlier—and they may have some time-critical information, so meeting later isn\"t a good idea, either.

Adhere to one-on-one scheduling religiously. I once had a manager who habitually canceled our one-on-ones over a two-month period. At that point, I assumed that he was ready to fire me. Instead, he was buying himself some time so that he could give me a raise and a promotion. However, because I hadn\"t actually talked to him in a couple of months, I resigned before he could give me the good news. He learned the hard way that habitually canceling one-on-one meetings can disenfranchise employees—or even lose them.

In general, I meet with everyone once a week. However, if you have more than 10 employees in your group, consider meeting with the self-directed people once every two weeks and with the less self-directed people once a week. You run the risk of letting problems lie fallow when you meet with people less often than once a week, but meeting biweekly is better than not meeting at all. When I manage other managers, I also use my one-on-one time to ask how their one-on-ones are going—I don\"t schedule regular one-on-ones with their staff.

I prefer one-on-ones that last about 30 minutes. I discuss each person\"s status in depth, and still have enough time to do any necessary coaching. When I\"m coaching someone through a specific task or project, I may extend our one-on-ones to 45 minutes or an hour for a few weeks. Don\"t worry if you don\"t use all the time you\"ve allotted for your meeting: It\"s easier to finish early than to run late and scramble for another scheduled date to continue the conversation.

One-on-One Anatomy

To initiate a one-on-one, ask an open-ended question. Then, wait for the answer. I generally ask questions such as \"How\"s it going?\" or \"What\"s important to you these days?\" If I get a nonspecific answer like \"Fine\" or \"Nothing,\" I then ask about each project the person is working on. If I still get a \"Fine\" answer, I might ask, \"What have you seen or heard that leads you to believe everything is fine?\" or \"What\"s not fine?\" or otherwise attempt to draw out the specifics. If I still don\"t hear any, I tell my employee that I need specifics, and ask if they know a better way to tell me what\"s going on. Through this exchange, we come to an agreement about how we\"re going to communicate.

I then ask specific questions about the work done the previous week, and what\"s on the agenda for the next few weeks, essentially asking them to break down their work into inch-pebbles (small tasks of no more than two days\" duration). I ask if they think they can keep to their estimates, and, if not, why not—and I don\"t blame them for any incorrect estimates. As we jointly discover what happened, the employee can estimate better the next time, and I can understand any estimation blind spots. I also ask questions about problems I can solve: \"Are there any obstacles you need removed?\"

I also use the one-on-one to discuss employee goals and performance on a weekly basis, especially if I have specific objectives (management by objective) that my staff is supposed to meet. In a fast- changing environment, the weekly one-on-ones help me determine which goals to keep and which goals to modify. I also use the time to give employees quantitative and timely feedback on their performance.

During the one-on-one, the employee and I usually come up with things to do during the next week: our action item list. We then review the action item list at the end of the meeting. This helps you verify that both you and your employee have reached consensus on the upcoming steps.

No Finger-Pointing

Discuss issues to solve problems, not to blame staff. An effective one-on-one creates a safe environment that facilitates communication. Encourage employees to use one-on-ones as an early warning system, to identify problems and to determine what sort of help they may need in the future. If you blame your staff or otherwise discourage them, they\"ll clam up, and you\"ll find out about problems only when they\"re too big to deal with (see \"Other People\"s Problems,\" Sept. 2001).

Often, I suspect that an employee is having a problem, but they don\"t think they need my help. That\"s when I clarify my expectations about the deliverables: \"OK, I\"ll expect you to check in your changes in time for Ted to make his. You\"ll let me know if that won\"t happen, right?\" This nonthreatening method makes the employee aware of workflow deadlines, and offers an opportunity to ask for help.

One-on-ones go both ways: If you\"d like to know whether or not you\"re doing a good management job, use the one- on-one to get feedback from your staff. You may use former New York City mayor Ed Koch\"s direct approach—\"How am I doing?\"—or ask more specific questions: \"Did that meeting work for you?\"

Encompassing the Group

When I manage groups in which people still need to know what other people are working on, I save that for my weekly group meeting, after the one-on-ones. Instead of everyone sequentially reporting on their status, I use a few alternative techniques:

Ask for a volunteer to describe his project, and what he found difficult, challenging or interesting about his work that week. This description provides a great springboard for more discussion about the project or about the technical approach to a particular issue.
Ask for a volunteer to describe her problem as a discussion point for some team problem- solving.
When everyone\"s working on a different project, or if you\"re managing a group with more than one project, have people sign up to give brief (no more than 20-minute), informal presentations about their project-general presentations, focused not on problems, but on sharing information. Then, the staff members can describe how their work fits into the project. I hold only one of these project presentations per week; preferably, one project a month. If necessary, I\"ll coach the project team (or the person), so that they don\"t spend more than an hour on presentation preparation.

Beyond Flotsam and Jetsam

By now, you\"re probably saying, \"Oh, sure. As if I have time to attend all these meetings with my staff. What planet are you on?\" The same planet as you.

You\"re already spending this time with your staff, but in bits and pieces, not chunks. All this communication flotsam and jetsam—e-mails, voice mails, hurried discussions in the hall—they\"re all one-on- ones—just not the most efficient kind. With all those interruptions, it\"s a wonder you accomplish any work—or clear communication—at all.

If you plan for one-on-ones, incorporating them into your weekly schedule, not only do people tend to gather their issues, preparing for the time they have your undivided attention, they\"ll feel free to discuss issues they won\"t bring up in public or in impromptu discussions: their discontentment with their current role, HR issues or other problems that could keep them from succeeding at work. With one-on-ones, your meetings will become enthusiastic exchanges of information, instead of court- martials for mutineers.

H2BOM