Your first 1-1 with a new hire, and you don't want to spend three months guessing who they are

You have their results open already, from the onboarding step before this. Two sections carry the conversation.

The Five Types of Work, near the back of their Career Discovery report, names the work that gives them energy. Understanding Styles names how they work with other people: how they decide, build trust, and take conflict. Open both before they sit down.

Here is why the first 1-1 is the one that matters. You form a read of a new person fast, and you rarely go back to revise it. If it sets on week-one nerves and the impression they made in interviews, you spend the next quarter managing a guess.

Set the read on their actual wiring instead, in the first half hour, and it is right from the start.

Hold the shape below as a spine, not a script to read aloud. When a beat opens something up, follow it.

Minutes 0 to 5: open on them, not the report. Before a word about what it says, ask what they most want you to know about how they do their best work. Try: "Before I tell you what I saw, tell me the conditions where you're at your best."

Minutes 5 to 15: shape the first month around their grain. Open The Five Types of Work together. It names their primary type and natural complement, the work they come alive doing:

• Analytical: data, logic, getting to the right answer.
• Creative: generating ideas, designing, making something new.
• Integrative: connecting people and pieces, seeing the whole.
• Influential: persuading, rallying people to a direction.
• Operational: running the system, executing, keeping things on track.

Ask where each should show up in their first month. Put an early project in their primary or complement, so the first thing they do here is something they're built to do well.

Minutes 15 to 25: set up how the two of you work. Open Understanding Styles, read their working style together, and say your own out loud. Ask what you should know about working with them, and what they should know about working with you. Then name one place your styles are likely to grind, and how you'll bridge it.

Minutes 25 to 30: write down what you both keep. Two things, where you can both see them. One: their first month, shaped to their grain, with one early project named. Two: a short "how we work together" note, a line each way.

When you finish, you hold two things. A first month built on evidence, not a guess. And a working read of this person you'd otherwise have spent three months assembling by trial and error. They hold a first month shaped to what they're good at, and the feeling of being understood on day one.