Dwarves Radio Talk 17 Conduct A 1 1 Session

In this Radio Talk, Thanh Pham - our Head of Web, shared how he conducts a 1-1 meeting with the Fellows. Working already four years at Dwarves, he has mentored a bunch of Juniors and realized many lesson-learned.

Understand the spirit of 1-1 session goal

Why do we need to run this practice, and how to avoid wasting time? First of all, it’s all bout building trust and creates mutual belief. When people don’t trust each other, there’s a gap among the level of seniority. The Fellow feels unsafe when talking and expressing with their leader. Well, they may think their ideas are invaluable and generate bad habits.

When issues happen, without trust, they keep the information, breaking the flow of information among the team.

How we conduct our 1-1 session

Timing A sharing hour weekly or biweekly.

Agenda We discuss and try to know more each other, not about working status reports, definitely.

In the first get-to-know, we do have a list of questions to learn about the Mentee:

• The personality
• What do they need from the company
• Why did they choose Dwarves
• What makes them grumpy
• How do they prefer receiving feedback
• Their career goal
• Their desire working environment Etc.

In the following session, we mainly talk about technical development, communication skills and share the actual experience. In a nutshell, we hold this more like a discussion. The Mentor just leaves the Mentee the fishing rob. They have to solve problems by themselves.

We also wish to receive feedback from team members as we would like to run a 2-way sharing. The best formula is 70-30 (70% from team members and 30% from the leader).