How Often Should Team Leaders Meet Their Members?
Studying the most effective team leaders will reveal that many of them have a sense-making ritual that they use to keep their teams on track. A check-in is a regular, one-on-one chat between a team leader and a team member concerning near-term future work, and it may be defined as follows:
What is the frequency of occurrences?
It happens once a week. By the third week of the year, these leaders understand that goals set at the beginning of the year are no longer relevant, and that a year is not a marathon that must be planned out in detail months in advance, but is instead a series of fifty-two small sprints that are each informed by the changing state of the world, as is the case with most marathons.
As a result, they understand that the most important task of a team leader is to guarantee that Sprint Number Thirty-Six is as focused and energetic as Sprint Number One.
As a result, these leaders meet with each team member once a week for a quick check-in, during which they pose two basic questions.
1. What are your top priorities for the week ahead of you?
I’d want to assist you in some way.
There is no expectation that the team member will provide a to-do list. In order to discuss the priorities, difficulties, and solutions of the team member in real time while the task is still being done is all that they desire.
Only in the present moment can we begin to make sense of it. After enough time has passed for the specifics to get obscured, generalizations form that are not conducive to rational decision-making. In other words, having a check-in every six weeks or even once a month is pointless since you’ll end up speaking in generalities.
The research suggests that checking in with your team members once a month is practically worse than worthless, according to the findings. The average rise in team engagement for team leaders who check in once per week is 13 percent higher than the average drop in team engagement for team leaders who check in just once per month, according to the data from Gallup. If you listen closely, it seems like team members are saying to you, “I’d prefer you didn’t waste my time if all we’re going to do is chat about generalities.”
Alternatively, either get down to the nitty-gritty of my task and how you can assist me straight away, or just leave me alone.”
In this way, each check-in provides an opportunity to provide a tip, an idea that may assist the team member in overcoming a real-world challenge, or a recommendation on how to improve a certain talent.
Check-ins may be brief (ten to fifteen minutes), but that is more than enough time to engage in some real-time learning and coaching activities. The intricacies of the particular issue the team member is experiencing, as well as the psychology she is bringing to it, the strengths she has, and the techniques she may have have attempted, must all be considered in this process of successful coaching.
It should be noted once again that the only way to bring these kinds of microdetails to light is for the dialogues to be frequent.
The team leader may say to himself or herself, “I’d love to check in with my employees every week, but I’m not able to,” or something similar. I’ve just accumulated an excessive number of folks! If it describes you, then you do really have an excessive number of individuals.
Another longstanding dispute in the realm of people and organizations is the span-of-control issue, which concerns the question of how many team members should be under the supervision of each team leader at any one time.
Some estimate the number of workers to be between one and nine. Others estimate the number to be between one and twenty. Some nurses supervise a team of forty people, while some call-center managers supervise a team of seventy or more.
The weekly check-in has been identified as the single most potent ritual of the world’s top team leaders, and as a result, we now know the precise span of control that is appropriate for every single team leader: it is the number of individuals with whom you can check in on a weekly basis, and only you. If you are able to check in with eight people but are unable to accommodate nine into your calendar, your span of control is defined as being eight.
It is possible to check in with 20 different persons, therefore your span of control is twenty people in total. And if you’re one of those folks who can really handle a weekly check-in with just two people, your scope of control is limited to two people as well. Therefore, span of control is not a theoretical concept that applies to everyone. What it comes down to is a practical matter of the team leader’s ability to pay attention. Your attention span is equal to the length of your control span.
Therefore, the weekly check-in is the anchor ritual in the service of intelligence, in the service of making sense of real-time information together. Your teams, as well as the size of them, must be designed in such a way that they are capable of doing so. You’ll also need to make certain that your leaders understand that this check-in is the most crucial element of their job if you ever get to the position of leader of leaders (or vice versa).
In addition to the task of leading, you should be checking in with each member of your team—listening, course-correcting, modifying, coaching, pinpointing, advising, paying attention to the intersection of the person and the real-world work—to see how they are doing. Leadership entails this kind of labor.
If you don’t agree with this, if the thought of weekly check-ins bores or irritates you, or if you believe that once a week is just “too much,” that’s fine—but please don’t take on the role of a leader in this situation.
How Often Should Team Leaders Meet Their Members?
