How to Use Your Weekly Check-In Meetings to Get Promoted

4 things you should be talking about with your boss each week.

Every company calls these meetings something different. Whether you call them ‘check-ins,’ ‘touch bases,’ or ‘one-on-ones,’ the goal remains the same across the board. These meetings are a chance to sit down with your boss each week to talk about how things are going at work.

But, beyond that, they are also a massively underutilized career growth opportunity.

If you’re someone who views your check-in with your boss as something that happens every week but isn’t particularly impactful for you, then you’re doing it wrong.

Just because you don’t experience the immediate gratification of their impact doesn’t mean there isn’t a long-term career benefit to these if you approach them the right way.

If you’re simply going through the motions of showing up for your check-in each week and rattling off your to-do list, you’re missing a prime opportunity to propel your career forward.

To highlight this, think about how your boss spends their time over the course of a year. How often are they expected to evaluate and report-out on your performance or potential? For most companies, this happens only once a year. Whether it’s succession planning or performance reviews, they’re not spending time on this every week.

But what they are doing every week is meeting with you to talk about what you’re working on.

If they’re not doing this, that’s an entirely different issue, and you should probably go work for someone else. Here’s why.

Let’s think of this exchange of information as an annual series of inputs and outputs. The scale is tilted in your favor because you have 52 chances to input information that will inform your boss’ output in the form of a talent rating or performance review score.

Therefore, your goal is to use each of these weekly touchpoints and their inputs wisely. You want to approach your check-ins each week as a pseudo-interview so that there is no question in your boss’s mind about what you’re up to and whether or not you are ready for that next promotion.

Here are four things you should be talking about during your weekly check-in meetings if you want to get promoted:

Tell them what you’re working on (in way more detail than you think you need to)

If you’re one of those people who is always complaining that your boss “doesn’t have a clue how much I do around here,” then you are in trouble.

You should probably spend less time complaining and more time thinking about why that is and how you can change their understanding of your impact.

You know precisely what you’re working on at all times, but your boss might not. And that’s reasonable because your boss can’t possibly observe you all day, every day. It’s your responsibility to fill in the gaps and articulate everything you have on your plate.

Because, when it comes to career growth if your boss doesn’t know you’re doing something, you definitely won’t get credit for it. You might as well not even be doing it.

Talk about the results your work is driving

Listing off tasks or projects is one thing, but most leaders are far more concerned about the results your work is driving. Why? Because results-orientation is required of nearly all leaders.

If you haven’t already realized it, every moment you spend at work is an interview for what comes next. Your boss is continuously taking in cues about you based on how you behave each day and then using those data points to evaluate your likelihood of succeeding at the next level.

Think about how you would answer a behavioral-based interview question (“Tell me about a time when…”). You would start by explaining the situation you faced, the task at hand, the action you decided to take, and the result of that decision.

Explain your work’s impact during your check-in meetings as if you were interviewing for the position you want next. Because, in a lot of ways, you are.

Your boss probably won’t ask you to get this detailed, but do it anyway.

Lift the curtain on your thought processes

In addition to what you’re working on and the results you’re driving, take things a step or two further:

• Explain why you’ve decided to work on a particular project
• Share the obstacles you’ve encountered in doing so
• Highlight the pros and cons you’ve considered along the way
• Justify why you made the decisions you made
• And reflect on what you learned throughout the process

There will probably be competencies you have demonstrated in the course of completing your work that your boss was not aware of prior to you telling them about it. Remember, they can’t possibly observe you every moment of every day.

So if you’re exhibiting things like executive presence, critical thinking, or leadership aptitude in a way above your pay grade’s expectations, they need to know that to be able to evaluate your performance and potential accurately.

If you never tell them, they’ll never know because most leaders will not regularly ask you for this detailed level of information.

It’s your responsibility to proactively offer your boss this window into your critical thinking process. Doing so will help them recognize when you are thinking like a leader and thus ready for a new challenge.

Articulate what job you want next

Has your boss ever explicitly asked you what job you want next or what you want your long-term career path to look like? If not, this is something you should probably very quickly make apparent.

Whether you’re being asked for it or not, make your career preferences known. And not just once or twice, “because the single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it’s taken place.”

Your boss cannot effectively advocate for you in your career if they don’t know where it is you want to go.

If you’re passively going through the motions of this one-on-one time you have with your boss each week, then you’re missing out on an opportunity.

Put yourself in the driver’s seat of these conversations. Make sure your boss knows about every facet of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it the way you are, and how you’re driving results in doing so — whether you’re being asked for this information or not.

Because the truth is that no one will ever care more about your career than you will.

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