You’ve heard the horror stories of employees with terrible bosses, you’ve spent hours hoping you weren’t that boss and not knowing how to tell if you did something wrong. The truth is, it’s a lot more effective to focus on what you can do to make your employee’s lives better. So to help you do that, we created the Employee Diaries.
What They Are:
These are stories from Grow Disrupt employees, highlighting the things that Stephanie has done that made their lives easier as employees and helped them find ownership in their roles within the company.
This Week: Susannah Scheller, “The Meeting that Saved My Job”
If you’ve been following Stephanie for any amount of time, you’re aware that she runs One-on -Ones with her team members as a major part of her team management. But she didn’t always run those one on ones: I know, because I was there for it! And I’m a huge proponent of these One-on-Ones too.
To show you why, I’m going to take you back to the time in Grow Disrupt before Stephanie instituted One-on-Ones with all team members.
Jump back to my highschool days…
As a highschool student who hadn’t really held jobs that required anything other than teaching martial arts to kids for the majority of my life, I wasn’t the best employee. But I also struggled feeling like I had any direction from Stephanie.
See, I had come into the company at the inception of Grow Disrupt: back when it was Scheller Enterprises and a Sales Training company. I’d had a major injury that prevented me from teaching martial arts, and my mom had hired me to create social media content for her company since that was something I could do without straining my injury. Stephanie saw what I was doing and asked me to do the same thing for her.
Side Note: I’d never had any actual training on creating social media content! Because we were all so new to the world of marketing and business, I’d been given a “here’s how you create a graphic in Powerpoint” and told to post inspirational quotes to the pages. So I did that, for years...
Flash forward to 3 years into the business, in the middle of my college days.
Stephanie had leveled up in a huge way.
The company as a whole had leveled up, and finally become the Grow Disrupt of today. But I was still doing the same things I’d always done, which went back to the minimal instructions I’d gotten as a 16 year old about social media.
I felt vague and lost, knowing that everyone else in the company was contributing toward a goal and not knowing if I was doing enough or even what my part of the company was. In fact, I often felt defeated because I would send her posts for feedback that would come back completely changed and yet I had no idea why my posts were so bad.
Something else I didn’t know? Stephanie was feeling frustrated too.
Because my performance level was so far below everyone else’s, she was feeling torn. I wasn’t producing what I needed to in order to stay with the company moving forward, and Stephanie hadn’t put time into training and cultivating in a way that allowed me to design to par with the current standards. It didn’t hurt that I was her sister, and there are layers of issues associated with working with family. Although we’ve since moved past the issues that working together as family can bring up, it was a huge conundrum for her at the time.
At one point, while venting to her coach about how she had to spend an hour editing my social posts each weekend, he suggested she start One-on-Ones.
Little did Steph know, I’d been dying to have these meetings I’d been hearing she was having with other team members. I craved the feedback and chance to grow and learn, and truly contribute to the growth of the company. So when she told me what I already knew (that my performance could be stronger) and offered the One-on-One as a solution, I jumped at the chance!
The Result?
My productivity and production levels started to take leaps and bounds. In fact, I started making such huge leaps and bounds in progress that at one point she commented on how that half-hour one-on-one monthly was saving her an hour per week of social content editing.
As we worked together and started giving each other feedback on how we were working together, deadlines, and how our interactions helped us accomplish our goals, the results were like magic. I began to truly thrive in what I was doing, because I was getting the feedback that I crave (In the DISC Communication styles, I’m a high C which means that I crave feedback and information) and was also able to ask for support where I needed it.
If you have a team member that isn’t quite living up to their potential (or your expectations)...
It might be time to implement the Monthly One-on-One! Trust me, you’ll see a difference within a few months.
Not sure how to run one? Check out Steph’s blog that includes details of her meeting agenda for the one-on-ones.