[DanHulton]

Yeah, honestly, as one of those managers with calendars full of 1:1s, I was kinda surprised at this. They’re frequently the most-useful meetings I have all week.

The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out. The things that were bothering them, or the task they were stuck on, or the team that’s been blocking them, or in better weeks, the ideas that have been really exciting them, or the people they’ve really been enjoying working with, or the tools they’ve been having success with, that kind of thing.

All of that stuff is INSANELY actionable for me. Sure, I can do project-steering work until the cows come home, but all these “little things” I find out in 1:1s that let me reduce friction or create opportunities, that’s gold.

[Aurornis]

> The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out.

I worked at a range of startups before joining my first corporate style company. This 1:1 meeting ritual was hard for me to adapt to.

At the startups, particularly the high performing ones, issues were addressed immediately. If a problem arose you talked to the people involved quickly. If it needed a meeting you got everyone together as soon as they were available or you messaged your manager to get it in front of the right people quickly. If you saved things up for the next recurring meeting then it was a problem.

When I joined a corporate-style company, that immediate and direct communication style was discouraged. Everyone was so busy with their meeting schedules that you were burdening them by bringing something up out of the regularly scheduled time slot.

The 1:1s had a performative agenda you had to follow with the classic ten minutes of obligatory chit chat or ice breakers before it was acceptable to bring up the work issues that you had been holding on to for 3 days for this scheduled meeting where it was permissible to bring it up.

All of the managers thought it was such a brilliant invention that this 1:1 format was surfacing the “REAL shit” that was “INSANELY actionable”, as if this was the only way to communicate. It seemed so absurd to me, having come from high performing startups where everyone just communicated to get their job done and was coached if they weren’t. Now I had to queue up all the issues and then follow the weekly ritual of chit-chat first, business second before I had a chance to bring it up in the culturally acceptable time slot.

I think these rituals are really comforting and provide a sense of routing and predictability that some people like, but I also think it can become a performative replacement for good communication when it becomes THE acceptable way to surface the real issues.

[Sharlin]

The thing is, "everybody just communicates" really does break down when the size of the organization grows past some limit. Everything is easy in a ten-person company, but that absolutely does not scale to a 1000-person company.

[Aurornis]

1:1s are designed for 1000-person communication. They're used by small groups of people like a manager and their team.

[phil21]

I've come to the conclusion that if I ever start my own thing again I will 100% ban all standing recurring meetings. Maybe an exception for projects-in-progress with a firm end date, but I'm on the fence on that one too. Zero high performing teams I've worked within - or led - has had such form of structure.

Standing meetings tend to devolve into performative uselessness. And they add stress, interruptions, etc. And worst of all - they tend to let people have a false sense of accomplishment afterwards.

1:1's I think can be useful for a certain type of employee, but should be 100% at that employee's discretion. The only use I see for them for that type of person that they have a predictable slot held open on their manager's schedule in the event they need to actually execute it. Most of them should be skipped or there are probably other issues in the employee:manager relationship.

I understand I am the odd man out when it comes to "meeting culture" but the more I get stuck in a myriad of standing meetings the more I have ossified my opinion on this subject. Meetings are not productive work. The older and more experienced I get the more useless I think they are.

A random meeting called because there is an issue to discuss and get a decision made on? Totally fine. Those are useful.

[schmookeeg]

Please let me know where to send my CV. :) 10000% agree with this. Not all of us need a weekly reinforcement that everything's okay. And if we actually need something, we can speak up without consulting Google Calendar first and waiting for a scheduled safe space to speak up about it.

[jjav]

> At the startups, particularly the high performing ones, issues were addressed immediately.

1:1s are not about addressing issues, most certainly not any issues that need addressing immediately.

If you have an immediate issue, open an incident or file a top priority bug, or whatever is the process at your company.

[JohnMakin]

Why does this have to take place in a meeting? Why can't it be in a team slack? What value gain do you give talking an engineer through what's bothering them? Are they not capable of that independently of you?

A middleman's value is quite limited, of course as a middleman, you don't see it that way, but I find these meetings extraordinarily unproductive, even anti-productive, depending on how bad the "manager" is.

[KaiserPro]

> Why can't it be in a team slack?

Only a few people can adequately explain themselves through slack.

It doesn't help that a lot of managers are _bad_ managers, and don't/can't/don't know how to run a tight 1:1.

the point of the 1:1 is to provide a high bandwidth way of getting worries and steers from employees to management and direction back to employees. if there is nothing to talk about then cut the meeting short.

[dieselgate]

Usually people clam up and are not vocal during group meetings. I am not one of them but it's super common. 1-1s allow people to be more candid.

[JohnMakin]

I am not against 1 on 1's, but making that a regularly scheduled thing as if that adds value is kind of what I am arguing against. If people don't feel comfortable voicing something unless it is in private to their manager, that suggests to me two things - the manager/leadership is not fostering a collaborative environment, or the person needs to work on that (with the assistance/support of their manager), which I see as a manager's primary value gain, empowering their employees.

Managing via 1 on 1's sounds (to me) like a complete waste of everyone's time and a little bit toxic. It also can create an environment encouraging people to go around each other and backstab rather than collaborate. I have been in a lead position before, I'd be very concerned and probably have a series of chats with any dev that sat on something like a blocker until we spoke one on one, or only felt comfortable speaking one on one.

Some things do need to be spoken privately, and they should feel comfortable doing so/scheduling it, but a regularly scheduled thing as a way of managing, unless I am completely misunderstanding GP comment, is crazy to me. Of course I am speaking strictly manager/lead -> developer. A manager managing managers is probably quite a bit different and does require scheduling 1 on 1's regularly to align and adjust, but I wouldn't really know, because I've never been in that role.

[lovich]

You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters in a 1:1 vs a public environment.

You're also an asshole manager if you're giving any sort of negative feedback on a person in a public setting.

You could always just schedule a meeting when someone needs a course correction, but then your employees who are clever little humans, will quickly figure out that any ad hoc meeting is going to be a problem for them and then have anxiety about those, even if its going to be a positive meeting for once.

Have you never heard people joke that their boss asked them for a quick chat and they thought they were getting laid off?

[JohnMakin]

> You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters

This is reframing the discussion a little bit. I said up thread, certain things need to be discussed in private, but why would it be on a regular, frequent cadence?

As far as negative feedback - yes, but isn't that what quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly reviews are for? If someone requires negative feedback on like, a once a week cadence, I'd be very concerned that employee was a good fit or being managed wrong.

[habinero]

> As far as negative feedback - yes, but isn't that what quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly reviews are for?

Absolutely not, no. The opposite of that. You never want to hear negative feedback for the first time at an annual review.

You don't want to be giving negative feedback every week, sure, but you do want to give feedback as close to the behavior as possible. Otherwise, you're just letting someone fuck up for months when they could be learning

[lovich]

The longer the period in between reviews the larger the gap can become between the manager and employees perception of the employees performance.

Personally I don’t think once a week is absolutely necessary but I tailored it to the employees. I let them choose a cadence with a maximum of once a week and a minimum of once a month and had a mixture of choices amongst my team.

Some people also want to feel heard, but I had to balance that out with my other responsibilities and couldn’t guarantee I could drop everything to talk, so I carve out the time on my calendar and also made it clear that we could drop the meeting that week if both parties felt it was unnecessary

[solumos]

Yeah, if blockers are coming out in 1-on-1 meetings, that’s a really bad sign

[thih9]

For the company, yes. But not for the manager - who now has insanely actionable stuff.

[mystifyingpoi]

> Why does this have to take place in a meeting?

Conspiracy theory (which I believe in): because calls or in office meetings are not persistent and they are not recorded, but chat messages are persistent. Anyone can say they didn't say something, it gets harder in writing.

[habinero]

That's not a conspiracy theory, that's intended behavior.

You want your reports to feel safe to tell you things, you (or they) can always shift to written later.