Doing regular (read: weekly) 1-on-1 meetings with each member of your team is one of the most effective ways to ensure that you're maximizing the potential of your staff and staying plugged in to their work lives so that you can be a more effective leader for your people. Below are a few ideas that I'm applying to my 1-on-1 meetings/coaching sessions that I thought might be of value.

• Establish objectives for each series of 1-on-1 meetings. Know what it is that you want to get out of the meetings, and be sure to share your agenda with each team member. As with anything, that has to do with coaching and incentives, you might want to customize this agenda for each member of your team.
  
• Focus on outcomes for the employee. Whether they be a skill improvement, a new problem solving tool, or anything else that helps them, focus on their benefit. Help your team to help you.
  
• Make sure that education is on your agenda. Do a role play, introduce a new problem solving technique, assign reading material that you can discuss next week, and hand off projects with a learning objective as a component of what your associate is tasked with doing. The goal here is continuous education and improvement.
  
• Help your employees to catalog wins and build a personal portfolio of successes. Especially if your's is an organization that affords lateral mobility, be sure that you're employee is tracking with the personal branding trends and keeping score accordingly.
  
• Conduct regular 'fit evaluations' on how the associate's role fits into the greater picture and draw out the impact that your associate has on your team, department, division, and company as a whole. Everyone needs context and a frame of reference to understand their impact and ability to make a difference.
  
• Focus on skill building exercises during some of your 1-on-1 sessions. Build skills together.
  
• Become a "corporate team recruiter" and evangelist for your people. If there are initiatives that you feel one of your team members would be well suited for, work on their behalf to get on that team. Get as many of your people as possible into positions where they're able to contribute to the greater good of the organization on a regular basis, outside of your own team.

Very intesting thread. Where can I find more information?