Welcome to Manager Tools. Today's topic, one-on-one's worker personal. Here we go. I think you'd agree that one of our regrets and sometimes it's a deep regret was

the emphasis that we made during our initial shows on 101s about getting to know your directs personally to the extent of

over-emphasizing it and I don't know if we've probably done many managers a disservice based upon kind of where we were at the time and how we described that.

Don't you think so?

Yeah, I think the whole point of this cast right is just to tighten our guidance about the balance between

work and personal and how to make it work during one-on-one's when we

started doing the cast in 2005.

You know, we were at that time in the process

consulting some pretty technical organizations.

And the managers at several of those clients

knew literally nothing about their directs and then in addition really professed no interest in caring about that.

So at the time we were pretty insistent with many of them

that they had to get to know their folks in order to get the best from them.

In fact, that was when I coined one of our cheats, which you know do you know the first names of all the kids of all

of your directs and they all they all failed at that point in time right yeah and so basically that led to our verbalization of our guidance being skewed based on the client

we were working with at the time.

We really didn't even realize how far in one direction we'd gone

until we started hearing stories of managers who insisted that their directs share really, really personal stuff, even if the direct didn't want to.

Or the manager feeling that they completely failed when their direct did not share the real personal stuff, right?

They're waiting for that story that

heart-wrenching story is something very deeply personal and they never got and so

they thought they were failing and we go talk to their direction they're doing

...