Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / How New Managers Can Use Weekly Syncs to Save Time
Transcript
- Lucas: There is a scene I have seen play out in maybe a dozen different companies now. A new manager — let us call her Priya — gets promoted. She is smart, she cares, she wants to be accessible. So she tells her team: 'My door is always open, just grab me anytime.' Luna: And immediately her calendar looks like a pinball machine. Every five minutes someone pops in. Lucas: Exactly. She is getting pulled into low-urgency questions, status updates she could have read in a doc, and small decisions that her team should be making on their own. By the end of the week she has done zero deep work and her team still feels like they are not getting enough direction. Luna: So the open-door policy backfires. It sounds generous but it actually creates more confusion. Lucas: That is why I want to talk about the weekly sync as a deliberate structure. Not a check the box meeting — a designed container for the things that actually need manager involvement. Luna: Give me the problem first. What is broken about the typical weekly one-on-one? Lucas: Two things. First, most one-on-ones are too vague. The manager says 'How is it going?' and the employee says 'Fine.' Then they talk about the weather for twenty minutes and everyone walks away feeling like nothing moved. Second, the same topics get re-litigated in Slack later because nobody wrote anything down. Luna: Right. So the sync becomes a social ritual instead of a lever for progress. Lucas: There is research from Harvard Business Review that looked at managers who adopted a structured sync template — a shared document with three fixed sections. Those managers reported a 15 to 20 percent improvement in their team's output within a quarter. The gains come from reducing the friction of 'what should we talk about?' Luna: And from actually tracking what was said so you do not forget. Lucas: That is the key. The template I like is called the Three-Item Agenda. Every weekly sync, the employee populates three things before the meeting: One, their top priority for the week. Two, one blocker they need help with. Three, one piece of feedback for the manager or the team. Luna: I like that because it forces the employee to do the prep, not the manager. The manager already has too much to do. Lucas: And it trains the employee to think in terms of prioritisation and escalation. Over time, they start bringing better problems. The first time you try this, you will probably get something like 'My priority is the Q3 report' — which is too broad. You nudge them: 'What is the one deliverable this week that makes everything else easier?' Luna: You are teaching them to differentiate between activity and output. Lucas: Exactly. Activity is 'I am working on the report.' Output is 'I will have the draft of the executive summary by Thursday.' The sync becomes a coaching moment. Luna: What about the blocker section? I find that employees often do not want to admit they are stuck. Lucas: That is a cultural problem. If the team sees blockers as failures, nobody will surface them. You have to normalize it. I tell new managers: In your first sync, say out loud, 'I expect every person to bring at least one blocker per week. If you don't have one, you probably are not stretching enough.' Luna: That sets a norm that it is safe to ask for help. Lucas: And the feedback section — that is the part most managers skip because it is uncomfortable. But if you never create a channel for the team to tell you when you are getting in their way, you will keep getting in their way. Luna: So the feedback goes both ways. That is the whole point of the sync, right? It is not a status update. It is a coordination tool. Lucas: Correct. And it should be no longer than thirty minutes. Twenty-five is even better. Parkinsons Law applies: the work expands to fill the time available. If you schedule an hour, you will fill an hour. If you schedule twenty-five minutes, people will get to the point. Luna: I also like the idea of a shared running doc that both people edit during the week. Not a blank page at the start of the meeting. Lucas: That is a great practice. Call it the 'Sync Log' — a simple document with columns for date, priorities, blockers, feedback, and next steps. The employee adds their three items before the meeting. During the sync, you both take notes in the same doc. After the meeting, you both have a record. Luna: So nothing falls through the cracks. And you can look back and see patterns — like 'Oh, Priya has been blocked on the same approval process for three weeks, that is a systemic issue.' Lucas: And that pattern recognition is where the real value lives. A lot of new managers think the sync is about the individual employee. It is partly that. But over time, the aggregate of those syncs tells you where your team's process is broken. Luna: You know, this kind of practical tool — it is the sort of thing that saves a new manager hours a week. And honestly, that kind of time-saving is why we keep doing this show. Lucas: Yeah. And a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you have gotten something out of them. It helps us stay ad-free and focused on stuff like this. Luna: Absolutely. So back to the sync structure: once you have the template, how do you get the team on board without it feeling bureaucratic? Lucas: You frame it as an experiment. You say, 'Let us try this for four weeks and then we will adjust it together.' That gives people permission to resist the template at first but also to refine it. Most teams, after a month, would never go back to the open-ended format. Luna: Because the open-ended format was costing them more time than they realized. Every unstructured sync is a small tax on the team's attention. Lucas: There is a term for that tax — I have heard it called the 'manager sync backlog.' It is the cumulative time spent in meetings that do not have a clear outcome. For a manager with eight direct reports, one unstructured hour per person per week is eight hours in meetings. Plus the context switching before and after. That is easily half your week. Luna: And you have not done any of your own work yet. So the sync backlog crowds out the strategic thinking you were hired to do. Lucas: That is why the structure is not just nice to have — it is a survival skill. The template forces the conversation to produce a decision or a next step. If a sync ends and there is no action item, something is wrong. Luna: What about when an employee resists the template? I have seen people who just want to talk. Lucas: You can still leave space for that. The first two minutes can be 'How was your weekend?' That is human. But then you pivot: 'Okay, let us look at your three items.' The template is a container, not a straitjacket. And if someone consistently has nothing to put in the blocker box, you might probe: 'Is there something you are avoiding?' Luna: That is a coaching question that the template surfaces. Lucas: Exactly. The template is a diagnostic tool. It shows you where the employee is struggling to prioritize, or where they are afraid to ask for help, or where they do not feel safe giving feedback. Over time, you can address those patterns. Luna: Let us talk about frequency. Weekly is standard, but is that always right? Lucas: For a new hire or someone in a critical role, weekly makes sense. For a seasoned contributor who is fully autonomous, you might go to every two weeks. But I would not go longer than that in the first year of managing someone, because you lose the rhythm. The sync is a heartbeat. Luna: And what about the manager's manager? Should you have a sync with your boss where you use the same template? Lucas: Absolutely. Model the behavior. If you show up to your one-on-one with your boss with a clear priority, blocker, and feedback, you are not just doing good management — you are teaching your boss how to sync with you efficiently. Most senior leaders will love you for it. Luna: So the same tool scales up. Lucas: It does. And here is a practical tip: block the fifteen minutes before the sync to review the doc. Do not walk in cold. If you read their three items ahead of time, you can spend the sync on the conversation, not on catching up. Luna: That small prep habit probably saves five minutes per sync — which over a year adds up to a whole workday. Lucas: Easily. And that is the whole philosophy: small structural changes that compound. The weekly sync is the single highest-leverage meeting a new manager runs. If you get it right, everything else gets easier. If you get it wrong, you are fighting fires all week. Luna: Alright, I am convinced. Next time I become a manager, I am stealing this template. Lucas: Do it. And let us know how it goes. We might do a follow-up episode on what to do when the template stops working — because eventually it will. Teams evolve. Luna: That is a good place to leave it for today.