I’ll be honest with you, for a long time, my one-on-ones with key leaders were good but not intentional. We’d catch up, troubleshoot something urgent, and leave feeling connected without being clear. Those meetings had warmth but not direction; high on relationship, low on intentional development. The truth is, I had never been trained to lead teams. I was a worship leader; a preacher; a teacher; and a developing pastor— someone who was learning to care well for others. But the task of leading people on a team, moving toward a particular goal together— that was something I had not been actually taught to do.
Over time, I’ve learned that the one-on-one is one of the most underutilized tools in a leader’s toolkit. It’s not because we don’t have them— though I’m learning that many lead pastors don’t actually have them!— but because we don’t structure them well enough to get the most out of them.
You can maximize your one-on-ones as a mechanism for development and alignment.
There is a simple framework for that.
Start With a Real-Time Agenda
Before anything else, I always open with a simple check-in:
“I’ve got a couple of things I want to get to today. Do you have anything you want to make sure we cover?”
It sounds small, but it frames everything. You’ve just made the meeting collaborative rather than top-down. You’ve signaled that their agenda matters as much as yours. And, honestly, you’ve given yourself a moment to breathe before diving in.
You build the “currency of trust” through transparency, consistency, and kindness. I’ll post more on that here some time. But that connection, that trust-building framing is crucial before the first real agenda item.
Now, here are four helpful questions that can transform your one-on-one meetings…
