[Aurornis]

1:1s add value to a point, but I’ve worked at one company where the fixation on 1:1s started replacing useful communication.

Like you’d try to talk to someone about an urgent issue and you’d be told to save it for your upcoming scheduled 1:1 on Thursday because they don’t have any time until then. Why don’t they have any time? Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.

1:1s started as a good way to formalize manager to report communication on a predictable schedule. This is good if the team isn’t regularly talking organically. Some company cultures take it too far and turn it into an excuse to make recurring meetings the focus of all work. I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people.

All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.

Middle management was always congratulating themselves on the success of their 1:1s because they said it was when they heard about all of the real issues they didn't know about. They didn't realize that by making themselves unavailable except for the 1:1s they were forcing this result.

It was even worse when the problems involved multiple people or teams, which was almost always the case. Now you had to wait until Thursday to talk to your manager about it, who promised to add it to the agenda for his 1:1 with other team the following Tuesday. Then in that 1:1, the other team lead would say he'd bring it up with his schedule 1:1 with the person the Friday after that. It was like every communication queue only got processed once a week, so each hop added more delay. The managers would always tell is it wasn't supposed to be like that, but trying to direct would get you hit with "Let's talk about this in our next 1:1"

The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.

If you haven’t seen calendars stuffed to the gills with performative 1:1s then this is all probably hard to believe, but it happens. Some companies got so fat with middle management that performative meeting rituals were the primary use of everyone’s time and you would be chastised if you tried to break the mold.

[jldugger]

> Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.

Dude, a a weekly 1:1 should be 30 minutes long. And managers should have at most 10 directs, so 5 hours total out of a 40 hour work week. Something has gone haywire and it's not the 1:1 thats the problem.

> I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people. ... All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.

Yes, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them. But what you describe does not sound like a 1:1. At most it's a cross-functional meeting, and should have multiple people from both sides.

> The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.

It sounds like someone got halfway through the ManagerTools guidance on 1:1s and decided they could improvise a better solution and failed. The purpose of 1:1s is to build and keep relationships, and they encourage this chitchat as relationship building, but the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_. If you want to talk about work that's great! The best way to build a relationship is working towards a common goal, and work is pretty much the only expected common goal anyways. And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda -- if a manager wants time on a direct's calendar they can always ask for more, but the reverse is much harder.

[icedchai]

I worked at a place where the manager had, at the height of the organization's growth, five reports. He couldn't handle that many 1:1's so, at one point, he made them into a "group" 1:1. Of course, that made no sense. Eventually his manager reversed the decision. I'm honestly sure what he did all day, but he eventually got laid off.

The best companies I worked for had no 1:1's. Eventually the company was acquired and the practice was "installed" by the acquirer.

[Esophagus4]

> The best companies I worked for had no 1:1's

The problem with this is we will ask, “if you want to talk about career progression, or go over a technical question, or talk about performance feedback, how do you get that from your manager?” And one might say, “just Slack them or ask them for a call.”

And the problem is that you now have created an environment where the voices the manager hears the most are the squeaky wheels, the people who can play politics. You don’t want that as a manager - you want an environment where you can get the best from all your team and everyone has the opportunity to get the benefit of a structured communication cadence with their manager, regardless of who plays politics.

There are some situations where you really don’t need 1-1s but these are rare edge cases (Jensen Huang is famous for not having them… but the people that report to him are senior enough to report to the CEO of the worlds largest company. So they don’t need much supervision.)

[Aurornis]

You don’t need a meeting scheduled every single week just in case the person might want to talk about career progression that week.

Many teams can and do function well without rigid weekly 1:1s. The best performing companies I’ve worked for didn’t have anything resembling scheduled 1:1s. Everyone talked to their managers during their work and managers were available for conversations if you asked.

It’s interesting to hear from people who have only experienced these rigidly structured 1:1 situations who can’t understand how anyone could communicate without scheduled 1:1s.

[icedchai]

I will agree 1:1's can potentially be useful, however, having them on a weekly basis often is way too frequent. I can count on one hand the number of useful 1:1's I've had over the past 10 years.

[watwut]

If you need 1:1 to talk about technical questions, something is horribly wrong. And I would expect pwrformance feedback to have its own set of meetings.

Second, scheduled 1:1 is not a mechanism to avoid politics. People who can play politics better are as much advantaged as they are without it. They will simply know better what to say and do in those 1:1.

[Esophagus4]

> If you need 1:1 to talk about technical questions, something is horribly wrong. And I would expect pwrformance feedback to have its own set of meetings.

With this approach, I hope you are not a manager.

[Aurornis]

What do you mean? Even at companies with strong 1:1 cultures it’s bad practice to save technical questions for 1:1s (shouldn’t be delaying them until the weekly slot) and performance reviews are scheduled separately from 1:1s because it shouldn’t take the place of normal communications. It’s an additional meeting with separate agendas.

[Aurornis]

> Dude, a a weekly 1:1 should be 30 minutes long. And managers should have at most 10 directs, so 5 hours total out of a 40 hour work week. Something has gone haywire and it's not the 1:1 thats the problem.

I agree wholeheartedly, but this company culture had different ideas than you and I.

Their idea of a 1:1 was that it was the formal and correct way to synchronize people. It wasn’t limited to managers and their reports.

This shows up a lot in companies with matrix-style org charts. You end up with product managers and designers assigned to 3 different teams and setting up 1:1s with their managers and certain ICs to sync. Then their managers set up 1:1s with the managers of the other teams. Instead of being a tree it turns into a giant graph with edges everywhere.

> And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda

Now imagine this multiplied by 10 1:1s. That’s almost two hours of a manager keeping people captive on Zoom repeating stories from their weekend. Now imagine this practice was semi-standardized as the ideal way to run 1:1s at this company, so each employee had to spend the first 10m of every 1:1 with their manager, their product manager, their design lead, their team lead, and other people following the template listening to their weekend plans. Now imagine that you get pressured to reciprocate because after they spend all that time talking about themselves they need to ask about your weekend and pull a response out so they don’t feel awkward.

Sounds insane? It was! I almost wouldn’t have believed it until I experienced it. I couldn’t believe how many people at the company acted like it was normal and good.

> es, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them.

I was in a manager role at the company I’m describing. I got reprimanded on my performance review for not having enough 1:1s and for declining 1:1s with people who were not my reports (they tried to claim I was shutting them out and preventing them from doing their job)

Trust me, the problem was not a lack of managers. It was the giant interconnected graph of too many managers trying to set up recurring meetings with each other because that was the expectation.

[jjav]

> Sounds insane? It was!

Well yes, it sounds insane.

It is good to connect at a personal level. Talk about your weekend, family, hobbies. This might happen naturally in an office setting, but with everyone remote on zoom, it's helpful to make it a habit. For most people these human connections are super supportive.

You can't force it though. Some people don't work that way. A manager must adapt to each style. I have employees who like to talk for hours about everything, so I'm happy to do it. I also have one employee who is very matter of fact, only brings up a specific issue if they need me to do something about it and that's it. I know nothing about their life outside work but that's their preference so that's ok too. They are one of the highest performers in the team, it's just their style.

[icedchai]

If I had not witnessed something similar myself, I wouldn't believe it either. How many "sync" meetings do you possibly need? How does anyone get any actual work done with all this going on?

[eudamoniac]

> the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_.

How about if the direct has absolutely no interest in talking about anything because they are just trying to do their job, which is going fine? Because that's 99%, maybe 100% of these meetings I've ever had.

[jjav]

> How about if the direct has absolutely no interest in talking about anything because they are just trying to do their job, which is going fine? Because that's 99%, maybe 100% of these meetings I've ever had.

Easy, send a message prior to the meeting "Hey, I have no topics to cover this week, so let's skip it and save the time".

Done.

[jldugger]

Thats fine, though if you do that forever you'll probably harm your promotion chances. Which, if your goal is just to get by, sounds fine?

But generally speaking, it's a chance for you to speak about your work to the person writing your performance review, and get feedback, which may be in short supply otherwise for various reasons.

[eudamoniac]

I don't know why I'd ever want a promotion, and I haven't ever got one. I did turn one down once. A promotion is like 5% more pay for way more work and a bunch of corporate bullshit along the way. If I want to move up I just change jobs.

[jldugger]

My last promotion from level 3 to level 4 was a 50% increase in pay basically, with no change in responsibilities or scope.

[throwaway29473]

That’s because you were already working at the next level. Your promotion was just a recognition of that.