Most advice on running good 1:1s is written for managing individual contributors, and it shows: unblock what they’re stuck on, talk about growth, check in on workload. That playbook doesn’t hold up once a manager is running 1:1s with team leads who each manage their own developers, DevOps engineers, QA engineers, and PMs — using it there isn’t just less effective, it actively works against what those conversations need to accomplish.
The question that changes everything: “how,” not “what” Link to heading
With an IC, a 1:1 often ends with the manager knowing what they’re working on and what’s in their way. With a team lead, asking only what’s happening on their team just produces a status report — the kind that’s usually available from a dashboard or a Slack channel anyway. What that time actually needs to produce is visibility into how they’re making decisions, because those are the decisions the manager isn’t in the room for.
The questions shift from “what’s blocked” to “walk me through how you decided to reprioritize this sprint” or “what made you handle that performance conversation the way you did.” Not to second-guess the call after the fact, but to catch early whether a lead’s judgment and the manager’s are drifting apart on things that matter — how much slack to give a struggling engineer, how hard to push back on a PM’s timeline, when an issue is serious enough to escalate versus handle themselves.
Resist the urge to solve it for them Link to heading
The hardest habit to break is jumping in with the answer. When a lead brings a problem — a DevOps engineer’s workload, a disagreement with QA over release readiness — the easy move is to just say what you’d do. It feels efficient. It also teaches leads, over time, to bring problems instead of decisions, which puts the manager right back in the bottleneck role that having team leads was supposed to remove.
What works better is asking what they’ve already considered and where they’re stuck, then helping them reason through it rather than handing over a conclusion. It’s slower in the room. It’s faster over the following months, because the number of things a lead needs to bring to their manager at all goes down.
Making room for what they can’t say to their own team Link to heading
A team lead often can’t be fully candid with the people they manage — about their own uncertainty, about frustration with a decision from above, about whether they’re actually confident in a call they made. A manager’s 1:1s with them are one of the few places that has to be safe for that. If a lead can’t admit uncertainty without it reading as a performance concern, they’ll stop admitting it, and the problem surfaces later, in a worse form.
What to check for over time, not in any single 1:1 Link to heading
No single conversation reveals whether a delegation model is working. What’s worth tracking across weeks is whether the same category of issue keeps surfacing in a lead’s updates without resolution, whether they’re making calls confidently versus running everything past their manager first, and whether the people on their team seem to be getting decisions from them or waiting further up the chain. That pattern, more than anything said in one meeting, is what reveals whether a team lead has what they need — or whether the manager is still, without meaning to, standing in their way.