What Makes a Great 1–1 Meeting?

Every week, I’m in several 1-1 meetings. Biweekly with the manager I report in to, and at various frequencies and lengths with the managers and individual contributors that report in to me. When I have good time zone overlap with people I try and hold them for 30 minutes weekly. When time zone overlap is not so great, 1 hour weekly.

It can be a lot of 1-1 meetings and I want to use the time wisely. So lately, I’ve been wondering, what makes a great 1-1 meeting?

It seems like a good question. Luke Thomas says that without objective evaluation of their efficacy, 1-1 meetings will tend to become inefficient venting sessions.

These meetings tend to feel like a therapy session at work, so team leads don’t want to cut the meeting off when one of their employees is in the middle of venting. I certainly wouldn’t feel good telling someone, “hey, sorry to cut you off, but your 30 minutes is up.”

This is precisely why 1-1 meetings become inefficient over time. This gravitational and emotional pull prevents many people from objectively evaluating the effectiveness of these meetings.

Howard Lerman says you shouldn’t hold 1-1 meetings at all. He calls them “a cancerous time suck in today’s modern organization” and thinks, like Luke Thomas, that they can “awkwardly teter on turning into unnecessary and unwanted therapy sessions.” Moreover, they’re decades past their best by date and that’s the root cause of this dysfunction. Why? Now that you can resolve issues immediately and asynchronously over text, 1-1 meetings are always going to fill up time with non-essential conversation.

The regularly scheduled 1:1 came out of the mid-century best workplace practices. In the 1950’s, middle management was a vital communication link between executives and the front lines. In an era before e-mail, text and video conferencing, leaders relied on middle managers relaying the message downward in a top down approach.

… with the rise of modern communication technology, it’s no longer necessary to route stuff downward through a chain of people, like an old telephone tree. Leaders today can reach everyone right away, and they do – freeing up time in the 1:1 meeting, and shifting the balance to a bottom up approach, where employees and their managers often are forced into an awkward session of irrelevant conversation to fill up the time.

Basically, a waste of time (the opposite of what we all want) and out of date.

I don’t think they’re out of date and I work at a company that is 100% remote and fully distributed around the globe. Most of my work day is asynchronous text communication. In my 1-1 meetings we step outside of the day to day, review weekly trends, set new goals for upcoming weeks, and hash out not-urgent but important issues that need the extra bandwidth of a video call.

On the other hand, I’d definitely agree that, like all meetings, and anything really, they can be a waste of time when not done with intent, a plan, and some way to improve.

The question then is, how do you do that?

One of the things I try and do is make sure they’re helpful with a bit of feedback. I try and ask, “What was most helpful in our 1-1 today?” at the end of most of them to help measure that. (Something I picked up from, The Coaching Habit.) It’s a small habit that quite often surprised me when I started it, and sometimes still does. I recommend trying it.

Do you hold them? Have you held them? Been in them? What would make your 1-1 meetings more helpful today? I’d love to hear a story or two from your lived experience in a comment.