You Stopped Believing the Answers You Get in One-on-Ones

He could not remember exactly when it started. Sometime in the last twelve months.

He would sit down with a direct report on a Tuesday afternoon. He would ask how things were going. She would say things were going well. She would give him a status update that landed cleanly. He would ask if there was anything he could help with. She would say she had it handled. The meeting would end four minutes early.

He would walk out feeling like he had missed something and be unable to say what.

This happened with three of his four direct reports. Not with the fourth, who was newer and still afraid enough of him to give him what she thought he wanted to hear rather than nothing at all.

What the polish was hiding

His team had not started lying. They had started curating.

Every one-on-one carried a small emotional risk. If a direct report brought a problem, there was a chance he would fix it in a way that made her feel foolish for not having fixed it herself. There was a chance he would ask a follow-up question she could not answer. There was a chance he would remember, in six weeks, that she had raised something and had not resolved it.

None of those outcomes were catastrophic on their own. They accumulated. After eighteen months of small risks, his direct reports' nervous systems had learned that the safer version of the meeting was the one where nothing hard came up. The prefrontal cortex knows this is not what a good one-on-one looks like. The amygdala does not care about that.

The polish was not deception. It was self-protection dressed up as competence. And it was extremely expensive, because it meant every problem in his organization was surfacing to him three weeks late, in a form that was already partially defended.

How much is one unresolved conflict really costing your company?

The two changes that reopened the room

He made two small changes and left everything else alone.

The first change was to stop asking the question he had always opened with. He stopped asking, "How is everything going?" That question invites a curated answer. It signals to the nervous system that a general, positive summary will satisfy the room.

He replaced it with a specific question about a specific thing he suspected was hard. "Tell me about the vendor renegotiation. Where are you actually stuck?" The specificity did the work. There was no way to give a curated answer to a question that already assumed something was stuck.

The second change was to name what he thought his direct report was feeling before she answered. When she started to hedge on the vendor question, he said, "You sound worried about telling me the number." She looked at him and said, "Yes." Then she told him the number.

The move is small. It is called affect labeling. Naming the emotion accurately lowers activity in the amygdala within seconds. The person on the other side of the desk can think again. And what they think, they can now say.

Doug Noll's new book Empathy Leadership: The Powerful Skill That Drives Winning Results lays out the specific moves leaders use to make one-on-ones honest again. See it here.

What he stopped doing that mattered more

He also stopped a habit he had not realized was expensive.

When a direct report brought him a problem, he had been trained by his own success to respond by solving it. He was good at this. His team knew it. Solving her problem in the room was the most costly thing he could do, because it confirmed the calculation her nervous system had already made. Bringing a problem to him meant losing ownership of it. Losing ownership meant losing status. Losing status meant giving him a shorter answer next time.

He started ending every hard moment in the meeting with the same question. "What do you want to do about it?" Then he waited. Sometimes for a long time.

Six months later, his one-on-ones ran long. He believed the answers again.

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