The detrimental impact of poor 1:1s with Ad Davies at Gymshark

OpenBlend’s Founder and CEO, Anna Rasmussen recently sat down with Ad Davies, Head of Talent Development at Gymshark to discuss the detrimental impact poor 1:1s have on performance.  

Having worked in the sporting industry before joining Gymshark 6 years ago, Ad is incredibly passionate about driving people and business performance through coaching and development, ensuring everyone has the knowledge and tools they need to thrive.  

Throughout their conversation, Anna and Ad discussed how effective 1:1s drive performance, the importance of balancing hard deliverables with the human elements, and the crucial role managers play in providing their teams with the support they need to perform at their best.  

Below are some of our favourite parts of the conversation, you can watch the full discussion below.

Ad, in your opinion, what is the role of a 1:1? 

“The role of a 1:1 in my mind is to provide three things at its core.  

It's to provide clarity to the individual that you are speaking to, and that's two-way clarity from the individual's perspective that they are given time to talk about what they need to and what's important to them, but also clarity from you as a manager and the business perspective on what's expected of them.  

The second is to provide leadership, so this is the opportunity for you as a manager or a leader to do what you're asked to do. So not just have that samey-samey conversation, Hi, how are you? How's the kids? Right let’s get into the work stuff, it's an opportunity for you to lean in, to listen, to coach, to mentor, to facilitate.   

Then last but not least, I think the role of a 1:1 is to provide accountability, and this is the bit that's missed most regularly in my experience. There are probably many people sat on this webinar and in businesses in general that will leave meetings and 1:1s today with no action, no agreement. They'll have a hard stop and another meeting that starts a minute later, and we lose the ability to agree action. So that's the role of a 1:1.

From a more human level, it’s to show that you're bothered as a leader, and if you don't do that, it's written all over you and it's written all over the conversation. 

We wrap this up into something called the ‘Performance Compass’ at Gymshark, so the role of every manager is to provide clarity, leadership, and accountability through the 1:1 conversations that you have.” 

How do 1:1s positively impact a high-performing culture and how have you seen that play out?  

“1:1s are absolutely there to drive performance. They're also there more clinically to give people time. That's a big part of the culture here, we want people to feel like they have time, because if they have that, they can get understanding and then they can perform.

We see it in terms of an increase in engagement, so over the last few years of working with OpenBlend, we've had a plethora of data available to us, and we've seen a steady increase in engagement with managers and relationships with managers, first and foremost, which is really positive. I know a lot of people will have all sorts of engagement data that they can dive into on this, but that is where we've seen a steady state in trend.  

Time to productivity is another one that we measure here, so we look at, across that employee journey - 30, 60, 90 days - how quick is someone actually getting up to speed and how can we utilise the 1:1s to see how quickly they're getting up to speed and to what extent they have what they need in order to perform. We'll then we'll obviously wrap that up into employee feedback and pulse questions here and there as well.” 

We know effective 1:1s must balance hard deliverables, whilst supporting the human that underpins them. How do you ensure you’re integrating the two to drive performance?  

"I think it’s how we are educating managers and leaders on what good 1:1s look like.  

Now we're not majorly into uber formality, we don’t say you must cover this, this, and this, but what we say to people in educating them is, look, you've got to put your laptop down or frame the conversation to say, I'll be opening it to make notes, then let's lean into where the persons at, first and foremost, to frame the conversation that you're going to have with them.  

Now, what the system [OpenBlend] does really well for us is it gives us those cues. I don't believe that someone's going to update their wellbeing scores and their manager is going to sprint over to the desk and say is everything okay? These are all frames for conversations and where people are at.  

So in educating managers, we say okay, lean into the person, let's see where they're at in terms of the conversation that you're going to be having with them, and let's not leave anything as a surprise. We shouldn't get into 1:1s and be shocked by the type of conversation we're going to have. So, you can utilise things like the agenda, which is obvious stuff, right? There's no curtain raiser here.   

I think the second part then is when you've lent in and you've listened a little bit and you're understanding where people are at, all the time you’re building interest and rapport, how then do we start linking to what the business is trying to achieve, because in most of the organisations I've worked in, we do the strategic cascade, once a year, and then you don't see any of that stuff again. So I need the ability to be able to look objectively and say, okay, this piece of work that you're doing, this priority I'm asking you to focus on, let's have a look at how that ladders up."

Watch the full conversation here. 

If you’re looking to transform 1:1 conversations in your organisation, get in touch with our team today or book your OpenBlend discovery call. We’d love to hear from you.