How to coach employees? Ask these 1-on-1 meeting questions by Claire Lew
The key to coaching employees lies in a single, straightforward choice: The 1-on-1 meeting questions you choose to ask.
You may be raising an eyebrow at this. Surely, you’ve heard enough hype about how “you need to be holding one-on-ones as a leader.” But the role that one on one meetings play in coaching employees is egregiously overlooked.
One-on-one meeting questions are possibly the most effective mechanism we have as leaders for coaching employees. When we invest in asking the right questions during our 1-on-1 meetings, our tendency to micromanage our team can be circumvented.
For instance, if we incessantly ask “ What’s the latest on X?” or “ When will this be finished?” during a one-on-one meeting, and we’ll likely come across as overbearing.
But choose to ask the 1-on-1 questions (I share 16 of them below in the “Ask these questions…” section), and you help that employee feel encouraged about their work and equipped to go solve the problems ahead of them.
Michael Sauers is the Director of Logan Library in Logan, UT. Prior to this he was one of the founding staff and Technology Manager for Do Space in Omaha, NE. After earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany's School of Information Science and Policy Michael spent his first 20 years as a librarian training other librarians in technology along with time as a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, a technology consultant, and a bookseller. He has written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and has published 14 books ranging from library technology, blogging, Web design, and an index to a popular horror magazine. In his spare time, he blogs at TravelinLibrarian.info, runs The Collector's Guide to Dean Koontz website at CollectingKoontz.com, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
Unless otherwise stated, all opinions are my own and are not to be considered those of the City of Logan, UT.
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