The Ultimate One-on-One Meeting Template for Managers (Using Slack Canvas)

After using this, you might feel like you can replace yourself with a dummy, but studies have shown employees prefer to be managed by animate objects.

There are a lot of moving parts in the actual job of “doing management.”

We need to provide feedback, coaching, and track KPIs. We need to have structured conversations around these things. And that’s just the foundation.

I’m a big fan of combining complementary techniques. I love learning something new and then figuring out how to apply its principles to my workflow.

That’s one reason I love this management template, and I hope you will, too. It will simplify many of the foundations of managing a team into a simple checklist, allowing you to focus on the bigger picture of management with more free time.

The Recipe

We will be using Slack, specifically its Canvas feature. These are shared, markdown-esque files that you can create on a per-channel or per-DM basis.

If you don’t use Slack, you can try fiddling with whatever tools you do have to create this. Obsidian, Notion, or Conluence could all work, but you’ll need to make sure permissions are set such that private conversations don’t leak.

You’ll create a canvas for each direct report. If you can’t use a markdown-esque tool, what you really need is just something where you can set up bulleted lists, headings, and clickable links.

What we’re trying to do is create a Map of Content (MOC) for each direct report.

The Guildmaster Template

Inside each MOC for each direct report, you want to have the following:

# Goals

Lorem Ipsum

# Status
- Jira Link
- Github Link
- Other searches
- Last performance review

# Strengths
- Lorem Ipsum
- Lorem Ipsum
- Lorem Ipsum

# Areas for Improvement
- Lorem Ipsum
- Lorem Ipsum
- Lorem Ipsum

# One on Ones

## 2025-09-23
* A new task
o A new event
= A new feeling or mood
- A new note

## 2025-09-16
x Finished task
...

How to Use Each Section

Goals

The goals section outlines the employee's current objectives, which extend beyond their day-to-day responsibilities. Goals should be set based on what the firm needs intersected with what the employee is interested in.

This may be learning a new technology or an area of the team’s assets that isn’t maintained as well as it could be. It could also be a task you’re trying to delegate.

Status

Status refers to anything you would typically expect in a status report. This can be a Jira link with query parameters already filled in for the employee, such as a report on their activities over the last month. One click, easy to see what they’ve done.

Same with Github or other tools. You want to build queries specific to this employee, then get those URLs as clickable links in here. Thus, with a few clicks, you’ll see what someone’s been up to at a glance.

Other links could include their most recent performance review, PTO time off, their calendar, or any other relevant information associated with them. You want this section to summarize them at a glance.

Strengths

Whenever you provide positive feedback, please update this section. If someone’s great at peer reviews, drop in here and add it to the list. If it’s already there, place a plus sign or a tally marker next to it. This helps keep track of how much positive feedback you’re giving, and also identifies who tends to excel in certain areas organically.

You can copy and paste URLs of specific Slack messages in here to provide a record of positive feedback if you’ve written it in Slack. Or comment when you gave it, if it was in person.

Areas for Improvement

Likewise, when you give critical feedback, you’ll want to document it. It helps people remember where they’re trying to improve, and it also serves as documentation for you and, eventually, even HR if things really go awry.

For areas of improvement, don’t just use plus marks. Instead, ensure that you provide the date of the feedback and include a link to any supporting evidence, if possible. If it was in writing, attach the URL link.

The key pieces of information here are the behavior that needs correction, the specific outcome (why it was problematic), and the date.

Do not just add to this section. This section is there to document actual feedback given. That’s the same for strengths, but it’s even more crucial here. Adding to this section without having a conversation about it is a real dick move.

One-on-Ones

For weekly one-on-ones, you’ll use this section.

Each meeting, you’ll create a new entry at the top of this section. In Slack Canvas, I was able to use the /today helper and get today’s date filled in. Set it off with a ## heading.

In each one-on-one, you’ll modify this document jointly with your direct report, and you’re going to do it like a bullet journal.

If you’ve never bullet journaled, what you’ll do is review the last one-on-one. Are there tasks (marked with a *, or emoji of your choice) that are still outstanding that are still important? If so, migrate them by copying them into this week's section. You can also review any events (o), feelings/moods (=), and notes (-) before talking about what’s on their mind this week.

Moods and feelings are excellent indicators to track for morale and engagement issues, both as a cross-section (the whole team, this week) and a time series (each individual, over time).

If tasks prove to be either too time-consuming to complete or interesting but of low priority, they can also be migrated to the Jira backlog or your project management app and tracked there. If this is done, try to retrieve the URL link to the task from the canvas app to show that it has been migrated.

Direct reports can do this themselves.

Pulling It All Together

This template serves as a home base for you and your direct report. It serves as a guide for each individual, a single source of truth for strengths and areas for improvement, and a feedback template. Essentially, if you want to outperform the majority of other managers with minimal effort, you can do so by utilizing this template as a checklist of behaviors to follow.

Little Improvements

Canvas URLs can be taken and used elsewhere. To make this easy to access and top of mind, you can set a reminder for your one-on-one times in Slack with this URL in the reminder, or add it to a Google Calendar invitation. This makes it easy to click into.

Performance review season can be simplified by using this as context. Just take a prior performance review, and this template (up until the one-on-ones go into the year prior). Use a prompt like this: “You’re an expert career coach. I’m providing a performance review of last year and my notes for this year in bullet journal format regarding an employee. Use the notes for this year to write a new performance review. Use the style of last year’s performance review as a guide.”

Never copy-paste the result. You always want to read it and edit it. You always need a human in the loop with AI. You may also want to add additional context from your Jira, Github, or other queries you've already prepared.

Useful Resources

This template is a valuable aid for many of the tactical skills we need to practice as managers daily. However, if you want a review of those tactical skills to understand better how this template ties them all together, there’s no better place to start than the Manager Tools Basics Podcast.

For more information on giving feedback, you can try Crucial Conversations, Radical Candor, or Giving Effective Feedback.

For more insight into how to coach, it’s simple, but I still highly recommend The Coaching Habit.

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