About this series: This is Part 3 of the Barbershop Leadership Series — five posts drawn from a conversation I had while getting a haircut at Players Studio in Oakville. Raf, the owner, was dealing with an underperforming employee and opened up about it mid-cut. What followed was a real talk about the management fundamentals that most people in charge of a small team either never learned or don’t apply consistently. Each post covers one principle. They’re written to stand alone, but if you want the full picture, start at the beginning here.
Of everything I shared with Raf over the course of that haircut, this one landed differently than the others.
When I told him about time blocking and building structured leadership time into his week, he nodded. He understood it, even if he wasn’t doing it. When I told him about one-on-ones, he said “yeah, I know I should do that.” These weren’t new concepts — they were things he knew existed but hadn’t built into his routine.
But when I told him to stop taking his own meeting notes, he looked at me like I’d suggested something slightly unusual.
Which is understandable. Because every manager’s instinct runs the other direction. You’re the one with the bigger picture. You’re the one who needs to remember what was discussed. You’re the one responsible for following up. So you take the notes, you keep them somewhere, maybe you send a summary, and the conversation is documented.
It feels efficient. It’s actually a trap.
Here’s what happens when you take the notes: you own the understanding. Your employee becomes a passive participant in a conversation about their own performance and development. They sit across from you, they listen — or half-listen, or think about what they want for lunch — and afterward, you hand them a summary of what happened. They received information. They didn’t engage with it.
And then, two weeks later, something comes up that you discussed in that meeting. A commitment they made. A standard you reinforced. A direction you gave clearly.
“I didn’t realize that’s what you meant.”
“I don’t remember you saying that.”
“I thought we agreed on something different.”
Sound familiar?
Now flip it.
The rule is simple: the employee writes the notes, not the manager.
In every structured conversation — a one-on-one, a feedback session, a check-in after a training exercise — the employee is responsible for documenting what was discussed. Not in exhaustive detail. A clean, simple format works fine:
- Date
- What we discussed
- Decisions made
- My action items and due dates
That’s it. After the meeting, they share it with you. You read it, and if anything is inaccurate or missing, you flag it. If it’s right, you confirm it. Either way, the record exists — and it was written by the person who was in the room.
Here’s what this changes:
It forces active listening. You cannot write an accurate summary of something you weren’t paying attention to. The simple act of knowing they’ll have to document the conversation changes how an employee shows up for it. They engage differently when there’s a record to produce at the end. Research from the Center for Creative Leadership consistently shows that active engagement — not passive hearing — is what makes feedback conversations actually stick. When you own the notes, you remove the one structural mechanism that forces that engagement.
It confirms comprehension. There’s a significant difference between someone nodding along and someone who has actually understood what was discussed. The notes are the evidence. If the summary they write back reflects what you intended to communicate, they understood it. If it’s off, you catch it immediately — while the conversation is still fresh — not three weeks later when the gap has already cost you something. Think about how often you’ve left a meeting confident everyone was aligned, only to discover later that people walked away with completely different interpretations. Employee-written notes close that gap at the source.
It eliminates the dispute. The employee cannot come back afterward and say they didn’t hear something, didn’t understand the expectation, or thought you meant something different. The notes are in their own words. They authored them. You confirmed them. The record belongs to both of you, but the accountability belongs to them.
It tells you something about engagement. An employee who consistently produces clear, accurate, timely notes is an employee who cares. An employee whose notes are vague, wrong, or perpetually late is giving you a signal worth paying attention to — and it’s a signal that shows up long before performance problems get serious enough to force a harder conversation.
This matters more than most managers realize. Studies on active listening and employee engagement consistently find that managers who build structured, accountable communication into their routines see measurable improvements in employee satisfaction and retention. The mechanism isn’t complicated: people who feel genuinely heard — who feel like their conversations with their manager actually produce something — stay longer and perform better. Asking employees to own the notes is one of the lowest-cost, highest-impact ways to create that dynamic.
It also protects you. I say that plainly, because in nineteen years of leading support organizations I’ve seen the consequences of poor documentation go both ways. A good-faith performance conversation, undocumented, becomes “he never told me.” A verbal agreement about expectations, undocumented, becomes “that’s not what we discussed.” The employee’s own notes — confirmed by you — are the cleanest possible record. They’re not a paper trail built to fire someone. They’re a shared understanding, built together, that makes misunderstanding much harder.
When I explained this to Raf, I could see him thinking through his specific situation. He had a trainee who he’d had multiple conversations with about the same things. The same feedback, repeated. The same adjustments discussed, noted, seemingly understood — and then not applied.
Had the employee been writing the notes, Raf would have known much earlier whether the understanding was actually there. And if it wasn’t — if the notes came back showing the employee had missed the point — that’s an opening. “I noticed in your notes that you captured it this way. Here’s what I actually meant.” The correction happens while it’s still cheap to make it.
There’s also a mindset shift that this creates over time, which is harder to measure but just as real. When you ask an employee to own the notes, you’re doing something more than just creating a paper trail. You’re signaling that the conversation matters. That their development matters. That you take these interactions seriously enough to make sure there’s a record. Most employees — particularly those early in their careers — haven’t worked for many managers who operate this way. The bar is low. Being the manager who is structured, who follows up, who holds the conversation to account — that alone sets you apart.
For someone who’s genuinely motivated to grow, that means something. They’ll rise to the standard.
And for someone who isn’t — that shows up too. Which is information you need.
← Part 2: Your Calendar Is the Problem, Not Your Employee
→ Part 4: Four Problems. One Root Cause.
Hutch Morzaria is a Director-level CX and Support Leadership professional with 19 years of experience building global support organizations across SaaS, Fintech, and enterprise technology. He has hired dozens of support and CX leaders across his career and holds ITIL Expert certification across V3 and V4.
