One-on-one meeting template

Fill in the template

ONE-ON-ONE NOTES

Their agenda first
   What do you want to make sure we talk about today?
   ______________________________________________
   ______________________________________________

What is getting in the way
   What is slowing you down or making the work harder right now?
   ______________________________________________
   ______________________________________________

The change in progress
   What are you hearing about the change from your side, and what is not working yet?
   ______________________________________________
   ______________________________________________

Feedback, both ways
   One specific thing that went well, one thing to try differently, and what I could do differently for you.
   ______________________________________________
   ______________________________________________

Support needed
   What do you need from me before we next meet?
   ______________________________________________
   ______________________________________________

Agreed actions and owners
   Who will do what by when, written in the words you both agree on.
   ______________________________________________
   ______________________________________________

Next meeting
   Date and one thing to follow up on.
   ______________________________________________
   ______________________________________________

Get the editable version: this template as a Word file with a worked example, in the Change Toolkit. Or learn to use it on your own change in the course Leading Change with Evidence.

How to use it well

These steps are practice suggestions, not tested findings.

It is their meeting. Open with their agenda before yours. If you only use the time for status updates, it becomes your meeting, not theirs.

Ask about what is in the way. "How is it going?" often gets "fine". "What is slowing you down right now?" is more likely to get something you can act on. During a change, ask what they are hearing from their side, and write the answers down without arguing with them.

Listen more than you talk. Treat the person's answer as information, not as the start of your reply. Ask one follow-up question before offering a fix.

Feedback goes both ways and stays on the task. Name a specific thing that went well and one thing to try differently. Then ask what you could do differently. Keep feedback about the work rather than the person (see the research below).

Write the actions down together. End with who will do what by when, in words you both agree on. Start the next one-on-one by checking them. A one-on-one where nothing agreed ever happens gives people less reason to raise things.

Protect the time. Move it if you must, say why, and offer the new slot yourself.

What the research says

No study in the Evidence Library behind this site tests one-on-one meetings as a practice, so how often to hold them and how long they should be are matters of judgment. Several studies speak to what happens inside them.

The quality of the relationship travels with many outcomes. A meta-analysis of leader-member exchange, the quality of the relationship between a manager and one team member, found it significantly related to job performance, satisfaction with supervision, overall satisfaction, commitment, role clarity and turnover intentions, but not to actual turnover (Gerstner & Day, 1997, rated Medium in the Evidence Library from its abstract). Leaders' and members' views of the same relationship were only moderately related, so do not assume the other person sees it as you do. These are pooled correlations, not tests of a meeting.

Being listened to. Across five studies by the same authors (744 people), being listened to by a supervisor was associated with more creativity, partly through psychological safety; in their vignette experiment the effect was small and based on imagined supervisors (Castro et al., 2018, rated Medium after a full-text read).

What managers say in conversations can change. In a randomized field experiment in a manufacturing company, supervisors received two feedback sessions on how followers perceived the messages in their most recent conversations. Their verbal leadership changed while the control group's did not, followers' perceptions changed to match, and performance outcomes improved in the experimental group (Zohar & Polachek, 2017, rated Medium from its abstract).

Feedback can be trained, and it can backfire. In a randomized trial in one municipality, employees of managers who took operant-based leadership training reported a greater improvement in that feedback than employees of waitlist managers, with no significant slowing over the 18 months measured (Grill, 2025, rated High after a full-text read). Feedback is not automatically good, though. A meta-analysis of 607 effect sizes found feedback interventions improved performance on average (d = .41), but more than a third of them decreased performance, and feedback became less effective as it drew attention away from the task and toward the self (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996, rated Medium from its abstract).

How it maps to the Unfrozen Loop

1. Week 0
   Before you start
2. 1
   Surface both ways

   A one-on-one is a place where bad news can travel up privately. The question about what is getting in the way is the Loop's first move for Surface both ways, asked of one person instead of a whole meeting.

3. 2
   Make sense together, top included
4. 3
   Start it close to the work
5. 4
   Review on a rhythm, then hold the pace
6. 5
   The middle’s own weather

   For a manager's own manager, the one-on-one is where the middle's own weather shows up. Ask what they are carrying, not only what their team is.

7. Ring
   Safe to speak, and speaking changes something

   Whether people say anything real in a one-on-one depends on what happened the last time they did. Report back on what you did with it.

Highlighted parts are the ones this idea speaks to. The mapping is my reading, not a tested finding. See the whole Loop and the evidence for each part.