After quite a few weeks without seeing Dawn for one reason or another, this week saw her visiting me at Madgex twice. Firstly on Wednesday to observe me doing a one to one, and then again on Friday for a more usual visit.

At Madgex the concept of "one to one"s is a principle we hold dear. This is a meeting between line manager and line report held regularly to feedback any news from the company generally, to catch up, to progress any issues, etc. I book mine in with my line reports every 3 weeks, meaning that Wednesday mornings see me sitting down with 2 of them and catching up for anything from 20 minutes to 45 minutes depending on what there is to talk about. On Wednesday Dawn came in to observe me in action. One of my line reports used to be an NVQ Assessor himself, so I thought he would be a good candidate for being observed, and he was. After a few minutes of feeling self-conscious we just got on with it. I usually start off by chatting about things I know they're doing out of work, and as it was Easter at the weekend the conversation started about chocolate. I then get them to talk about what they're currently doing at work, how things are going, and try to elicit any frustrations that they have, following up on anything that they raised or mentioned last time we met. I then move on to feeding back any company news or anything else that I have to share with them. And then finally, a quick check to see if there is anything else they want to talk about, if they're generally happy before going our separate ways. I desperately wanted to conduct my one to one in my usual manner, rather than acting differently, as I was really interested in getting useful feedback. I know that I wrote more notes that I normally do but other than that I felt I was pretty pleased that I didn't change too much. The feedback I got from Dawn was mostly positive, which is always good to hear, and she seemed to think that my format worked pretty well. I need to get her to do another observation later on, so I need to give some thought to whether I get her to observe another one to one, or a different type of meeting.

Friday's catch up was mostly about my progress with module E6 - Ensure health and safety requirements are met in your area of responsibility. I'd started working on what is effectively an essay to provide a Professional Discussion style approach to cover this off. I started with another mind-map listing the outcomes and had identified areas of evidence for each of them which I'd then written about. Dawn reviewed where I had got to so far and confirmed that I was heading in the right direction, and agreed that yes I had got my outcomes covered. We then went through the behaviours and knowledge and understanding requirements and I was delighted to discover that quite a lot of them were already covered too. So, before my next meeting in the beginning of May, I need to spend some time expanding my work to date to encompass these additional areas and I'll be well on the way to submitting module 4 of 7. Time to decide which module to tackle next.