You know that awkward silence in one-on-one meetings, no matter which side you'd been on. You're not sure where to take the discussion in this semi-informal meeting, so you're just suffering in silence.

One-on-one meetings are the platform to build trust and rapport in a manager-report relationship to make teamwork effective. The idea is that you both give up time to sit down together every week and talk about whatever your member of staff wants to.

There are different approaches to this, but I recommend you hold one-on-one meetings weekly . A regular, predictable cadence is essential, so your employee knows that you’ll make time for them.

It’s a great idea to take notes over the week and to bring them to the meeting . They can be observations about the dynamics in the team; they can be specific to your report or to any question that comes up. When it comes to engineers, you may ask questions about design or architecture; both are good topics of conversation.