One on One

It is a great learning experience to be in a Team. You know so many different ways of thinking about a thing that it amazes sometimes. Human Resource has always been an interesting aspect of management and more so in the world of Technology where everything is in the brain. If you cannot keep your employees happy, you are not tapping the potential of their brains to create value for your company. It is AS SIMPLE AS THAT. As part of ensuring you turn out fire before it spreads, managers and top management have what is known as One on One.

One on One is basically a meeting where an employee sits with his manager and discusses (almost everything which falls into the realms of discussion). It is meeting where in general it is assumed that there will be focus on things which are contentious, things which might be negative about you. This knowledge about what could be in hold for you prepares you in advance. There is nothing wrong because if you do not know you are in a hole, you will never get out of it.

So I had these one-on-one meetings with my top management some days back. Now as it turned out, it was different from one-to-one. It was two-to-one, as top management and my manager were both sitting there to discuss the things with me. There can be both negative and positives about this move which form the basis of a different blog post, but here are some excerpts from the meeting.

1. The Top Boss set the agenda for the meeting saying that he wanted to hear more of negatives than positives so that we can improve. Positives are already there and so nothing special to discuss.
2. My manager spoke about me - well he spoke nothing but positive things about me. I think this is not quite right considering this is once a while opportunity to tell what can be corrected. My fault I did not go out of my way to encourage him to do that.
3. My turn and some things which I think we can improve:
1. We are involved in decision making too late. It is common knowledge in software world that the later you change a wrong decision in a project, the more costlier it is.
2. We should get the buy-in of the stakeholders. I read it somewhere and I think it holds true for all teams - For any deal to be successful, it is very important to have buy-in of all stakeholders. If people feel it is their decision, they will go to any extent to make sure it is successful.
3. It is not a coalition government. You need to think what is best for the company. If everyone agrees, it is ideal. If some agree, it is good. If none agree, then change your decision as it will never work.
4. Everyone loves good work, so be careful while taking decisions. Different people have different mindsets, so you need to balance it. Managing people is almost a full time job if you want to do it well.