In The Room #32 – Don't be a one-hit wonder. Be a leader your people can count on every week.

In the room recently, I was working with a leader whose team had roughly doubled in size over a couple of years, from the mid-teens to well over thirty. The weekly catch-ups she used to run with every direct report simply couldn't survive the math. So they quietly stopped. What was left were the big moments, the annual review, the development discussion, the occasional difficult chat that had been brewing for a while. She'd spend an hour preparing, have a genuinely valuable discussion, and walk away feeling like she'd done some good leadership.

Then six weeks would go by.

That's the problem. One great conversation every now and then doesn't create a great leadership relationship. Don't be a one-hit wonder.

Consistency changes the conversation

The managers who have the greatest impact on their people tend to do something far less dramatic. They build a regular rhythm of attention. Gallup's research backs this directly: having one meaningful conversation a week with each person is one of the most important habits a manager can build, and it doesn't need to be an hour. Fifteen to thirty minutes, consistently, is enough.

If you haven't properly spoken with someone in six weeks, there's a lot to catch up on. Projects have moved. Frustrations have accumulated. A small problem from three weeks ago may now need real intervention. When you talk every week, you're not reconstructing the last month. You're already in the story.

Two questions, every week

Marcus Buckingham describes one of the simplest leadership rituals I've come across: fifteen minutes with each person, every week, built around two questions. What did you love about last week? What are you working on this week? Notice the first question isn't “what did you achieve.” It's what you loved. That gives you a window into what actually energises someone, what they were doing, who they were working with, which strengths might have been showing up. Over time, the answers become genuinely useful data.

The Handback Question

There's a trap hiding in the second question, though. When someone says they're stuck, capable managers often jump straight into solving it. We've seen it before, we know the answer, it would take three minutes to fix. So we do. And the weekly check-in quietly becomes another mechanism for transferring problems back to the manager.

Before you solve it, try the Handback Question: what do you think you should do? You'll be surprised how often they already know.

“I don't have time for this”

This is the objection I hear most often. So make the meetings smaller. Fifteen minutes, not an hour. Eight direct reports is two hours a week. Put them in the calendar as recurring, same time each week if you can, so it becomes part of the operating rhythm rather than something you constantly have to organise. And when something else comes up, move the check-in rather than deleting it. Once your team learns their time with you is always the first thing sacrificed, you've told them something, whether you meant to or not.

If you genuinely can't find fifteen minutes a week for each person who reports to you, the problem probably isn't your diary. It might be your role design, your workload, or simply the number of people you're trying to lead. Buckingham is blunt about this: if you have too many people to give each of them that regular attention, you may simply have too many people. Gallup's more recent research adds some nuance, there isn't one universally correct span of control, since managerial talent, workload and the nature of the role all matter, but the underlying capacity question doesn't go away.

What the check-in actually says

“Come and see me anytime” puts the responsibility for the relationship on the other person. A weekly check-in says something different: I'm going to make sure there's space for you before you need to ask for it.

So this week, don't redesign your performance system. Don't create another form. Pick up your calendar, find fifteen minutes with each of your people, and ask two questions. What did you love about last week? What are you working on this week? Then listen, get curious, and resist the urge to solve everything they bring you.

Great leadership rarely comes from one extraordinary conversation. It comes from being there again next week.

This post is part of the In The Room series, weekly observations on leadership, teams and what really happens when people work together. I've turned this into a one-page Weekly Check-In Card, the two questions plus a few prompts to stop it becoming another status meeting. Reply “CHECK-IN” to any edition if you'd like a copy.

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