[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.)

[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.

[Esophagus4]

As a manager, it’s your responsibility to give your people feedback on a regular basis to help them grow, and follow up. You need a regular place to talk about these things.

Performance conversations are not once a year, they’re regular and routine.

On the flip side, if someone is not meeting performance expectations, you have to be having those conversations early, coaching / supporting so nothing is a surprise at review time, or worse… if you have to fire someone, they deserve the opportunity to fix the issue first so you want to be telling them where they stand and why.

On technical questions, sure - don’t save them for a 1-1, but I am able to be a sounding bound for my engineers when they mention what they’re working on, and I give them guidance. Sometimes they go, “oh yeah I’ve already thought of that, it won’t work for this reason.” And sometimes they go, “huh, I didn’t think of that. I’ll look into it”

[jldugger]

> performance reviews are scheduled separately from 1:1s

The performative annual review meetings can be separate, sure. But managers should be discussing with their directs in 1:1s sufficiently that no criticism or praise contained within is heard for the first time.

[icedchai]

"Annual reviews" are another joke. They're, more often than not, a huge time waster for everyone involved. I've seen performance evaluation forms with such convoluted questions, they were obviously the result of insanely muddled group think.

[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.