Favourite management templates
My general rule is that everything you say twice should be written down, and everything you do twice should have a checklist or template. Here are three of the templates I use the most as a manager (in addition to the Potato Checklist).
The first two templates are for one-on-ones between employees and managers. I’ve used these both with people I’m managing and with my own manager.
I have ~weekly one-on-ones with the people I manage. The purposes of these are:
Help them resolve bottlenecks or problems they’re having
Help them set and prioritise goals for the week
Check in on how they’re doing
Make it easier for me to coordinate across the team
Here is the template I’m currently using for my one-on-ones. It consists of three tables.
The first table is for checking in and giving and providing feedback. We use a scale from 1-5 to rank how we’re doing, in addition to our productivity, motivation and burn-out risk. We’ll usually only comment on this if it’s a very high or low score, and particularly if it’s been low for a longer period.
In addition to asking for feedback, I also ask for half-baked thoughts and ideas. This is to lower the bar for actually providing and giving feedback, and for making it easier for them to share ideas they have about the organisation and our work. It also makes it easier for me to come up with feedback, as I can share things I’m not sure about or haven’t thought a lot about.
The second table is a review of last week and plan for this week. The employee will mostly fill out this themselves, apart from one section that’s for suggestions from the manager.
The review section includes some prompts for the employee to reflect on what they want to do differently next week and what they’re particularly proud of.
The last table is for discussion topics. This is where we put topics we want to discuss and is what we’ll spend most of the time on in the meeting. There’s also a column for next steps, which I’ll use to note down action items for myself afterwards.
For more senior employees and people who work part-time, I’ll usually only meet every other week or once per month. This is the template I use for those meetings. It’s a lighter version of the template above. It also includes an overview of the projects they’re working on at the top.
The third template is for project descriptions that work for both smaller and larger projects. Here is the template. It’s particularly useful as a reference document for those times you’re unsure exactly what the purpose of the project is or you need to decide which direction to take it in.
Ideally, the first step in any project is filling out a project description alone, with your manager or with your team. By project, I mean any task or set of tasks that takes days, weeks or months to complete (i.e. not just a few hours). At my current workplace, this is typically writing a paper, creating a presentation, and organising an event.
The project description has four sections that covers key people involved, the goals of the project, what the end product looks like, and what can go wrong with the project. The template works well for smaller teams that have a lot of variety in the type of projects they do.
As with all templates, I encourage you to adapt them to what actually works for you. These templates are the result of many iterations over the past few years!