Contracting: Your First One-on-Ones

Normalizing your first one-on-one meeting

Your first one-on-one meeting can be somewhat harder than the ones that follow. Just like meeting any human being for the first time, your first one-on-one could unfold in a multitude of different ways. You might be lucky enough to immediately gel with your direct report. The conversation flows and away you go. Or the conversation may fall flat. Is there a method to normalize this first meeting so that it works better for both parties?

If you’ve started your managerial role in a new organization, you will not know your direct reports intimately, which may make it challenging to judge the right level of formality to bring into the meeting. On the one hand, you’re their manager, but on the other, you need to be their ally. You don’t want to be too serious as you may risk causing alienation. However, being too jovial might come across as strange depending on the person and the existing culture of the organization.

Even if you’ve been promoted from within, that doesn’t necessarily mean that these meetings are going to be any easier. In fact, they could be more awkward because your relationship between you and your colleagues could be changing. Close peers may now be subordinates, and this is a strange and potentially difficult change to navigate through, especially if you and your peers have become good friends. This is starting to get complicated isn’t it? What should you do?

Rather than risking your new relationship with your staff getting off to the wrong start, there’s a useful exercise that you can both follow that allows both parties to openly talk about what they expect from one another and outline their wants and needs from the relationship. This exercise is called contracting, and you’re going to learn how to do it.

Contracting?

When preparing for your first one-on-one, explain that you’re going to do a short exercise to understand how you can ...