How do you ask an employee to bring facts or bullets to 1:1 to help resolve issues, instead of them presenting a Tyler Perry worthy reenactment. Don’t get me wrong I have an open door policy and great relationships with my whole team, they feel comfortable chatting with me and I don’t want to tarnish that. However, for this gentleman, every other issue cannot be a 5 alarm fire. He is a great relationship builder and follows task through to resolve, but the road to resolution is rough, often.

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Is there any existing structure to your 1:1? I would start there. Some sort of report/list, like you mentioned. If you had that ahead of time, that would give you a chance to formulate ways to keep the conversation moving, around the reenactments. (Lol) It may also provide him the time to work through that in his own head, so he can summarize it and (possibly) spare you the drama. If structure doesn't help, you may need to find a way to address it more directly. When you say 5 alarm.... is he looking for an audience or is he genuinely puzzled by the situation? If it's the latter, you may be able to approach it from the "let's see if we can take the emotion out of this for now and work with what we know" or something along those lines. If he needs actual guidance, he may not know how to present it. He also may think that that "drama" shows how hard he's working to resolve something, not realizing how it's coming across to you. If he's great with other relationships, he may just not know how to relate or speak to his boss the same way.

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Challenge him to fit his point into 5 min. Say “I’m expecting for the call in 5 min, can you quickly summarize your issue?” And when he does, ask him to come back in 30 min with 3 ideas on how they can be resolved.

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I agree with the response from the "Energy Advisor". These are great points and differentiating between whether he simply needs your attention or truly needs help solving an issue is where I would start. I would add that open door policies are rarely good for a leader or their people. This issue could be resolved by creating office hours and consistent 1:1s but having a closed door policy the rest of the day. My assumption is that your goal is to develop your people into confident, autonomous contributors. If yes, then you want them to learn to be resourceful, critical thinkers and problem solvers. That means you are not available to answer all of their questions. Creating office hours will force them to figure things out or hold the question until the established time. 90% of the time, they will figure it out. You will get massive time back and their confidence will skyrocket. Open door policies make the leader the bottle neck.

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