A Claude skill for running weekly 1:1s that actually go somewhere. It helps you prep the meeting, write it up afterward, and keep track of what's open, so the time you spend in the room goes to coaching your report instead of trading status updates.
- Preps the meeting for you. Builds the agenda from your topics, pulls in last week's open items, and drops anything that's just a status update.
- Makes you brief each topic first: what it is, the options, and the decision you need. Nothing shows up cold.
- Keeps a running file on each person, so action items and recurring problems don't get lost between weeks.
- Writes up the meeting from your notes or a transcript and pulls out the action items.
Most 1:1s turn into status updates the minute things get busy. This keeps them from doing that.
You use it three ways. Before the meeting, it builds the agenda from your topics and the person's history and strips out the status stuff. After, you hand it your notes or a transcript and it writes the log, lists the action items, and flags anything that's slipping. And if your 1:1s have gone stale, it'll tell you whether structure is the fix or whether you're better off leaving them loose for now.
Behind all three is a simple file on each person that the skill reads before a meeting and updates after. That's how it remembers what's open and catches the things that keep falling through.
It's part of the run-and-coach set and works alongside pipeline-coaching-cadence and forecasting-discipline.
field-tested. I ran this for years with my own reports while we scaled PlayStation's sales org. I started with my head of global sales, then rolled it out down every layer. The worked example below is the real story, including the part I had to change once it hit reality.
Most of it is borrowed from Patrick Lencioni:
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, for how trust leads to results.
- The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, for why people check out: feeling invisible, feeling like their work doesn't matter, and having no way to measure their own success.
- The Advantage, for treating the health of the team as the actual job.
What I added is the operator's side. Only put structure in when you need it. Make every topic end in an action. Brief before you talk. And keep a couple of simple rules so the cadence survives a busy week.
Claire ran global sales for me. Early on, the job was mostly keeping up with demand, her patch was in good shape, so our 1:1s were basically her reading me the wins. That was fine at the time. I spent my attention where things were on fire.
Then the market grew. We had more customers, and they all looked different and sat at different stages. The number kept going up, but it stopped being predictable, and we started seeing friction across sales and the teams around it. We were keeping up with demand instead of driving it.
So we changed the 1:1. Small change. It helped a lot. The time split started moving around week to week depending on what was going on, but every topic now had to end in "so what are we going to do about it." I had her brief me ahead of time, so nothing showed up cold and we could actually think it through together. We got back to driving the business.
To be straight about it, the 1:1 wasn't the whole reason we turned it around. But it gave us the structure to think clearly and stay on top of things. We rolled the same approach out to every layer below us, and it worked the whole way down. The further down it went, the more tactical it got, which is exactly how it should be.
"Prep my 1:1 with Claire."
"Here's the transcript from my 1:1, write it up."
"My team's 1:1s are just status updates. What do I do?"
It's a Claude skill. Drop the folder where Claude loads skills, and keep a folder with one context file per report. For writing up meetings, any transcript works (Granola, Fathom, Otter, Copilot).
- Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
- Patrick Lencioni, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (also published as The Truth About Employee Engagement)
- Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage
Open an issue or start a discussion. If you run this and something breaks or bends, tell me. That's the most useful thing you can send.