The power of 1-on-1 meetings
I live with my sister and she works for Harvard. Since they've been working from home, I've been a fly on the wall - I got to learn what her workday is like, notice how her department tries to build team culture, see how they brainstorm, and hear how she engages with her coworkers on a daily basis.
One thing that keeps making an impression on me is my sister's 1-on-1 check-ins with her direct manager. This meeting happens every week at the same time. Sometimes it was on Zoom and other times it was on the phone if her manager was away from the computer. Regardless of how, it always happened.
They would have conversations about current team projects, such as getting a simple status check or solving problems they're experiencing as they arise. They would also talk about long-term goal planning and how my sister could think about advancing her own career.
I've never had these conversations before in my life, and I wish I had even just one at every job I've had - let alone meetings on a weekly-basis!
If I think about meetings I've had with my boss, manager, or supervisor, they are often performance reviews where it is often one-sided. I'm told how I'm doing, what I should keep doing, what I should stop doing, and that's it. Or it's a meeting about what's wrong with my work.
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I have read about the importance of such 1-on-1 meetings between managers and team members, and it was fascinating to witness it second-hand over the course of a couple years.
I've learned that 1-on-1 meetings are the cornerstone to effective leadership and developing a productive work relationship.
Why should we have them? This article offers some insight, including the following:
Give and receive feedback
Motivate employees
Get pulse check on job satisfaction
Reduce barriers to success and help overcome challenges
Identify action items
Get real-time status updates on key projects
Talk about career growth
The result of these meetings is often better employee engagement, deeper relationships between manager and team member, and increased trust within a team.
These are important points of growth for the musician setting as well.
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So I'm curious about how we can incorporate 1-on-1 meetings as a conductor. How do we use that to cultivate a relationship with our musicians?
Obviously, we can't meet with 65 people for 30 minutes every week. It is not practical.
What if we reframed our goal and simply aimed for one meeting per season?
Assuming 65 musicians and a 30-minute meeting per musician across a 40-week season, we would need to average 1.6 meetings per week. That's less than 1 hour a week. This is possible if a conductor met with a range of 1-3 people per week across a season.
This is a relatively small weekly time commitment, but for some conductors a weekly commitment is not ideal. So these hours can be consolidated in some weeks to create more flexible schedules. Perhaps meetings could occur when individual musicians have off-weeks or when the conductor has off-weeks.
One meeting per season is a good starting point, and it may be all we are able to manage at first. At the same time, it's important to note that the power of the 1-on-1 meeting lies in its regularity and frequency.
We can slowly work this up to 2 meetings per season - maybe even 3. Perhaps we can gain more frequency by simply adjusting our meeting time to 15-minutes per musician.
There are many ways to do the math as per our own needs and what feels right. It may require us to test and retest until we find the rhythm that works best for us and our organization.
What is crucial is that we start.
We need to start engaging our musicians beyond the financial and artistic ways. We need to see our musicians as individual people who have immediate challenges, tasks, and projects as well as long-term goals, interests, and visions.
We won't know what those things really are until we make the time and space to find out. A 1-on-1 meeting is one way to achieve that so we can help our people do their best work and feel like a person while doing it.
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