When used well, line management meetings can be highly productive.
They help teachers to discuss issues they are facing, develop long-term plans and devise new ideas to grow their careers, and allow managers to ensure that staff are working as well as possible.
As someone who has been running one-to-one line management meetings for many years - and was fortunate enough to receive positive line management early in my career, too - here are five tips I think are key to making them a success for both participants.
Line management: successful one-to-one meetings
1. Protect your time
The most crucial piece of advice is to ensure that you formalise your meetings so they are in the timetable and, ideally, cannot be moved.
I schedule an hour and aim to ensure that each meeting is at least 30 minutes as a minimum so the individual involved knows their time is valued and you are not clock-watching or rushing off to do something else.
2. Have a plan
You should both agree on some “standing items” at the start of the year so you have a consistent agenda to return to - this could be their priorities for the year or an area of development for them to work on.
This can also help feed into any longer-term plans they may have. Where do they want their area or their teaching to be in a year’s time? Where do they see themselves professionally in three years’ time?
Ideally, this may then feed into a wider school development plan, too, giving you both a clear purpose for the items you choose to focus on. Once you have established your agenda for the year, stick to it and refer back to the goals whenever you meet to check progress.
3. Be flexible
While having the standing items means you always have something to discuss and an overarching purpose to the meetings, you should begin each meeting by asking them how they are and if there is anything they want to raise or discuss - rather than launching into what it is you want to talk about.
This hopefully gives them space to discuss the things that are most important or pressing to them, so you don’t end up having to try to shoehorn these things in at the end of the meeting when you are potentially short on time.
It may mean that standing items are missed for a session, but that’s OK because you can always return to them when the time is right.
4. Set the right environment
Of course, for the above to happen, it’s crucial to establish an environment in which people feel able to open up and share.
This means creating a space that is welcoming and outside of the hectic school environment they have just come from. It’s important to recognise that each person you work with will have a different way of engaging in these meetings, so you have to be guided, in part, by their needs.
For example, when someone brings a problem or an issue to you as their line manager, you could use it as a chance to help coach them to find their own solution or idea; others may just need direct instruction as to what they should do.
The key is being alert to the situation and understanding what will work best at that moment.
5. Hold yourselves to account
Sometimes, a line management meeting can just be a chance for someone to vent or get advice on a problem - but, ideally, you should try and have at least one actionable process that you and the other person agree to do before you meet again.
It is important that this includes you as the line manager, so it is a genuine two-way process where you both act on what is discussed. Make sure you keep a written record of what you agree to do so you can check up on how it went the next time you meet.
Keeping records like this is important even if no action is set, just so you can refer back to past discussions if required and ask how a certain situation has developed since it was last raised, or if they want to talk again about something they brought up a few months ago.
Line management is one of those things that can seem deceptively simple but is actually fundamental to a well-run school. After all, how staff feel they are treated, listened to or advised, and whether they are allowed to blow off steam, can make a huge difference to retention.
As such, anyone with responsibility for line management meetings should make sure they do everything possible to make the time they have for these sessions as productive as possible.
Sarah Arney is an assistant principal in a mixed secondary 11-18 school in Bromley
