The Ultimate Guide to First Meetings

How to invest in relationships, nurture trust, and build the foundations of a high-performing team.

Your first meetings with new team members are critical. They’re a platform to invest in relationships, nurture trust, and build the foundations of a high-performing team.

Too often, engineering leaders fail to use this platform. First meetings skew too technical or focus on outputs and metrics. It’s not uncommon for new team members to come out of their first meetings more confused than they went in.

As a remote native for the last three years of my career, I’ve always been deliberate in how I build relationships with my team. It’s not always possible to physically meet everyone (now more than ever), and it’s easy to skate over the process of getting to know someone when you don’t physically spend time with them.

Throughout my career, I’ve created, adapted, and perfected tools that help me be a better leader — from a guide to 1:1 meetings, to this, my template for first meetings. Steal this template, adapt it to your team, and let me know how it goes — I’m always looking to grow and improve.

My First Meetings Template

My template is broken down into three sections: ways of working, communication styles, and motivations. Each section is composed of a series of deep, meaningful conversation starters. Often, I find that people take some time to think about their answers and get back to me.

I use this template primarily for my direct reports, but I also use some elements–particularly questions about respect and feedback–when working cross-functionally.

This template serves to establish a foundation of trust and respect. For me, that’s table stakes, but it’s not all that common in the tech industry. My approach to first meetings makes me a better leader, in that I can always meet people where they want to be met; an approach that changes the entire context of relationships. By investing in my people up front, I get a multiplicative return in the future, and you can too.

By now, hopefully, you’re starting to appreciate the benefits of using a consistent template for your first meetings. Let’s dive into the template itself:

Ways of Working

• When are you in your peak productivity and creativity modes?
• Have you read our communication norms? How should we think about connecting when there is an urgent request? What if it’s not so urgent?
• What kind of learner are you (e.g. visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc)? How do you best receive or process new information or instructions?

Initially, these questions might seem pretty pragmatic, but the answers truly reveal how to best work with someone.

We all have a lot of responsibilities outside of work — that’s life. Encourage your team to embrace them, but also try to define peak productivity hours for your team. For example, pre-pandemic when office’s were open, one of my teams used to use these core hours of 10–3 pm to collaborate so that’s when we schedule our meetings.

Be mindful of the ways people like to work and communicate. Some of us–especially engineers–like to get in a deep “flow state” where we can produce our best work, safe from distractions. At Slack, we call that Maker Time, and we create protected times for our builders to get in the right mindset and focus deeply.

Some people like to communicate asynchronously, others prefer direct calls. Learn what your people favor, and you’ll always know the best way to reach them. Meeting people where they are at is very powerful, and it’ll help you build more meaningful relationships, quickly. And set expectations for emergencies, so you know how you can best support your team when they’re going through something difficult.

I also ask about learning styles. Your job as a leader is to make your people better, and you can’t do that unless you know how everyone learns. I’ve found the insights from this question are compounding — you can use them to nurture a thoughtful, inclusive environment that makes your whole team better.

Communication Styles

• What does respect look like for you in a professional setting? What are some examples of how you assess respect from a manager and your colleagues?
• How do you like to give and receive feedback?
• What do you feel you have yet to receive in your career?

Respect is foundational to all my relationships, Asking someone what respect means to them can be a very grounding, illuminating question. It signals your intent as a leader to invest in that person, to work to make them feel valued. Often, people don’t know the answer to this question right away and take some time to reflect before getting back to me.

Exploring how someone likes to receive feedback is a way to save everyone a lot of friction further down the road. When you hit a sticky situation, the last thing you want to do is to give someone feedback in a way that’s unhelpful to them.

Asking this question benefited me hugely in one of my first major initiatives at Slack. We were working on a long-term vision. Communication was ad-hoc, it felt like the scope was constantly changing, and it was a struggle to keep up.

In our first meeting, my partner on the project had told me that they wanted to receive “active, open dialogue.” So I scheduled a meeting, and framed my feedback with “in spirit of the active, open dialogue that you value, I have to tell you this”. We overcame the hiccup and the project continued smoothly. Without asking how to best give feedback, we might still be struggling with that initiative today.

The question about what people feel they have yet to receive in their career is a recent addition to the template. It’s a fantastic way to learn what’s important to your team. Use the answer to start formulating a plan that will get them there. Whether that’s creating growth opportunities, mentorship, or championing them across the organization, it tells me how I can best support my people long-term.

Motivations

• How do you like to be recognized?
• What motivates you to meet a goal?

When I think about how my team likes to be recognized, I almost think about it as their love language. For some, it’s words of affirmation — visible, public praise in a team Slack channel. For others, its gifts — a thoughtful token of appreciation marking an important anniversary or achievement. By knowing how my team likes to be celebrated, I can make them feel valued in a way that’s unique and special to them. And when you make people feel amazing, they stick around.

I had a direct report who was a busy parent and one of the most thoughtful people on our team.When I asked how they liked to be celebrated, she said gifts. I resolved to do something thoughtful for her one-year anniversary. I put together a care package of cozy socks, some Labrador earrings (she’d recently lost her dog), and yarn in our company colors (she loves knitting).

I’ll never forget her tears of happiness when I gave her that package. Paying attention to the small details has a lasting, powerful impact on your relationships as a leader. She remains a great friend, someone I mentor and meet with regularly.

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It’s important to me that tools like this are common knowledge — I’m a firm believer they improve access to leadership positions. Done right, first meetings are investments in your relationships that return multiples in the future. They’re one of the first steps to building a high-performance team.

So take this template, put your own stamp on it, and use it in your first meetings. And let me know how it goes — I’m always eager to learn!