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I work in a matrix organization where I am not the employees daily project manager, but I am the functional manager responsible for performance, development, and retention. Functional management is not my only role. I am also assigned to a project myself with my own project and functional managers. Meeting all my directs every week seems like overkill when I am not even assigning them tasks. In this case do people think less frequent One on One's are justified or not?

mfculbert's picture

There is a podcast for that.

I have my team of directs. I also have a few people who work on projects with me from time to time. When we are working on projects we have weekly meetings. They follow the protocols set up for the project manager o3s and work very well. When we no longer share a common task then those o3s disappear and I get the time back.

Best of luck! 

angelicdoctor's picture

I am in  similar situation with my engineering staff.  I do not own the program budget under which my engineers work.  Further, they have their own respective team leads under those assigned programs from whom they receive their tasking.  As a result, one of the two pilars of management, that is driving results, has been outsourced, if you will to other people, the team lead and the program manager.  Even so, I still insist on having one on ones especially since I am directly responsible for their performance reviews among other things.  It is vital that I maintain awareness of their activities from their perspective and to ensure that they are engaged personnel.  It is through regular O3s where I can be of great benefit for them and to ensure that I can deliver well on the second pillar, that is retaining good people.