Practice: Running 1:1s

What the interviewer is looking for:

• Experience managing a team large enough to understand the value of 1:1s.
• Prioritizing regular 1:1s with your team.
• Investing in your employees' long-term career growth.
• Proactively gathering feedback to understand the health of your team.
• Explaining your management style with concrete examples.

Here's what a good answer looks like:

"I think one-on-one meetings with my team are incredibly useful, so it's important to me to set up regular meetings to create time and space for open communication.

When I join a new team, I'll take the time to set up a one-on-one meeting with as many people as possible in the first week to get to know each person and their career goals. I typically set up recurring weekly 1-1's with all of my direct reports and biweekly meetings with peers and indirect reports. For the first meeting, I've found it's helpful to have a joint meeting with the current manager if possible to gather as much context and answer any questions about the transition. For regular 1-1's after that, I typically schedule around thirty minutes on the same day each week.

In terms of structure, I like to come with a few topics prepared to get the ball rolling, or give a heads up on announcements or opportunities that may be relevant to them. Otherwise, I like to think of the 1-1 as unstructured time for engineers to tell me what's on their mind. Obviously this can vary a lot, so depending on the seniority of the engineer, I may try to steer the conversation toward subjects I think are more relevant to their career level. For junior engineers or new members of the team, for example, we might talk more about skills they want to develop and career growth. For example, during a 1-1 with an engineer last year, I noticed that they sounded less excited about one of the projects they were assigned. When I asked about it, they mentioned that they felt their work was becoming repetitive and they weren't learning new skills, so we came up with a plan to have them work alongside one of our senior engineers on another project that involved more backend development. In the end, they ended up accomplishing more during that sprint and learning more skills.

When necessary, I'll also use this time to deliver constructive feedback or bring up any performance concerns I've noticed. I think it's always better to deliver this kind of feedback in a private setting since it gives people the liberty to be more open about their feelings. I'm not trying to be everyone's therapist, of course, but I think it's super valuable to create that kind of space to listen."

Explanation

This is a strong answer because it demonstrates that you've had success running 1:1s with different kinds of engineers, you have a flexible management style, you care deeply about hearing feedback from your team, and you have a passion for growing engineers. The use of a concrete example (with a positive outcome) helps illustrate why you've chosen this method of running 1:1s.

Here's what a bad answer looks like:

"I'm not a big fan of meetings in general because I like to give my team as much heads-down time as possible to focus on their work. However, I like to make myself as available all the time on Slack and email, and I usually respond within a few minutes, even at odd times of the day. Whenever an issue or conflict arises during a project, I'll schedule time with the people involved to discuss what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. I haven't had too many of these issues before, though".

Explanation

This answer communicates a lack of proactivity and immaturity in your management philosophy. You neglect to acknowledge the value of 1:1s when you lump them in with "meetings in general" and your approach signals a reactive management style — you wait to act until issues have already occurred. The fact that you haven't run into many of these issues signals that you're either very new to management and simply don't have experience, or you're out-of-touch with your team. Finally, noting your availability at off hours signals that you perpetuate "always on" culture which can be harmful to work-life balance and may reflect negatively on you.

Try it yourself

Record yourself answering this question. When you're finished, score your answer on the criteria below.

Great answers:

• Demonstrate an understanding of the value of 1:1s (not "just another meeting") and a personal management philosophy that reflects this.
• Demonstrate genuine passion for helping engineers grow.
• Demonstrate enough experience to arrive at this sense of value authentically (even if not directly as an EM.)
• Ability to actually implement effective 1:1s (not cancelling them willy-nilly, actually developing career plans with positive results, like team members getting promoted.)

Grading Rubric:

Score your answers according to the criteria below.

Values 1:1s.

☐ Your answer clearly communicates that 1:1s are critical, and not just "another meeting."

☐ Your answer includes a summary of your management philosophy based on your experience (i.e. not taken from a management book.)

Has the right experience.

☐ Your answer includes enough detail for your interviewer to understand how your philosophy developed (e.g. if you used to structure 1:1s differently, why did you switch?)

Implements effective 1:1s.

☐ Your answer includes an example where an engineer directly benefitted from 1:1s (e.g. you implemented a growth plan and they got promoted.)

☐ Your answer demonstrates proactivity in helping your engineers grow (i.e. you actively use 1:1s to check on the overall health of your team and to collect feedback.)

Shows genuine passion for growing team members.

☐ Your answer clearly shows that you know and care about your team through examples (e.g. one of your engineers was interested in machine learning, so you had her work a stretch assignment with the ML team to gain experience.)