Like the author, I have had some ongoing 1:1s be incredibly productive. Like really changing my life. Unlike the author, I wouldn’t broadly recommend them. They’re so easy to do in a way that isn’t productive. I think that’s the default, really. So if I was going to tell people to do them I’d be very explicit that you need to do something different than you probably think. Here are exacts steps and characteristics, if you don’t follow these then it won’t work and don’t come to me about it.
The overall general trend of why they’re not effective is they’re too surface level. You say some updates to your boss in a way that doesn’t get you fired, maybe complain about some stuff. You kinda just talk about things.
It needs to be a time when there is some work really happening. It’s metawork, but it’s still work. Like “what were the things that distracted you last week?” and you write them down, there in the meeting. Not “anything distracting you lately?” “nope I’m fine”. It’s a much more vulnerable, interactive process. This is probably why a 1:1 with your boss isn’t the most effective person. Too much image to maintain.
I think the sports model is better. In baseball, the Manager (coach or head coach in other sports) makes decisions about who is playing. Coaches (aka assistant coaches or trainers) are skill experts who help you get better. You can be more vulnerable with them. I think some industries, especially software, would do well to have more of a manager/coach model.
This was rude and uncalled for.
I can see people believing this for Agile-style standups (I can argue both sides of that one), but something like a scheduled weekly 1:1 should always be valuable sync time for an IC and manager. It also should not be a prison: if you want to skip a week, slack your manager and say "I've nothing, you have anything this week?" or something like that.
edited to add: that said, I too have never had the "unreasonably effective" experience, which is your broader point.
Think about that!
It is irrelevant to them that there are managers and even Corporations (ew! boo hiss!) that do not, in fact, act that way. They really hate it when anyone points out that treating employees well can result in greater profits, not fewer.
And from the manager standpoint, that means that they've never tried to assign work that matches up with the interests of people they manage?
Did you simply mean to say both fucked up?
I would be surprised to find that neither of these have ever applied. That would seem to indicate that their entire professional working experience has been only ever adversarial and toxic. Just not a great look, especially if you've also been responsible from the manager side.
It may very well be that the original commenter should look into changing how they handle and respond to 1:1s. It might help them.
I don't have any sort of dog in this race, but I read and reread your comment, and each time took the impression that you think little of 1x1s. Having read your other comments in the thread, I think I see better that you were disagreeing with the _broadness_ of the author's claim, not the claim itself, but I can understand other commenter's reactions.
I mean if it's your well established thoughts then it's definitely your well established thoughts, regardless what anyone else thinks you thought, but I don't think jcash was the only one caught of guard with how/what you were countering the author on.
This is true, and also feedback on your views from the replies on HN can be valuable and make you a better manager.
Your comment on the other hand is completely rude and uncalled for as it gives zero value and the only thing we learn is that 'it hurt your feelings', probably because you too dislike 1:1s
Your main comment could be read in a way that you almost hate 1on1's and find them completely unnecessary. But in another comment you said that it's not true - you actually love them.
Now in here you say "lol" and that it was rude, so which is it? are you laughing at this comment or feeling offended?
I don't think it's necessarily rude to point out something that is obvious, without judging. You are the common factor of the 1-on-1's you took part in. They could suck because of the whole organization, or because of the people that talked with you, but it's also possible it's something related to your character or skillset. I think it's worth looking into this and a reasonable feedback, not a "rude" one.
I have no idea about you, so in very general terms to have them be unreasonably effective there needs to be preparation and input from both sides.
Even if nothing else happens in the 1x1, it is where you can build personal relations as well. That will happen regardless of how prepared anyone is, but it is not always a positive one.
I read an article saying how great 1x1s are and how they worked surprisingly well in a new situation. Then I saw your comment that said you disagree and had some descriptions that I would take it to mean you don’t like 1x1s. You also described the broadness of your experience (thousands, countless people, both sides).
So, I tried to indirectly (sort of as a joke) point out that in one way your experience is not broad.
I’ll say it more explicitly: You are in all of your 1x1s. If you’ve had many 1x1s with many people, we can pretty certainly say it’s something about you that’s the common factor. And no judgement with that! Maybe the common factor is “I don’t like talking through work with one other person at a scheduled cadence”. Totally fine. I have no specific criticisms about you in your 1x1s.
Then I kinda launched into my own opinions on 1x1s thinking it might help you or someone else. Also just to clarify my thinking by writing, let’s be real.
And based on another comment you left, seems like I was wrong about you disliking them? Then, yeah, don’t worry about it. Keep doing what you’re doing.
How? You would need to be on a team that's basically completely nailed safety in order to have an accurate view into that just from group conversations.
That they are a timesink used to justify a positions existence, rather than boost productivity? That's correct.
I agree. I don't really like admitting failure to my manager. While they're very understanding and easy to work with they're also the person writing my reviews, so there's some tension there.
I think I'd be able to open up more with someone not in my management chain. Maybe even someone who is not in the same business unit as me.
Meetings should be treated like investments: by spending the time of the participants, are you going to reap the rewards of time saved in the future?
Sometimes there is information that does need to change hands, often there just isn't, and meetings take away considerably more time than they take by breaking people out of work that isn't always easy to pick right back up.
Meetings are often just babysitting for managers, keeping them entertained and engaged when they don't have anything better to do (or preventing them from doing the things they need to be doing necessitating hiring more managers who make more meetings and result in less time available per person)
So many standups and 1:1s I've been in have just been an exercise in all parties thinking of something to say because it is presumed stuff needs to be said.
To be fair, I do still think it's worth showing up to the meeting even if you think there's nothing to be said beforehand, since sometimes breaking out of the routine gives you the opening you need to get something off your chest. Sometimes it's possible to get overly caught up in the flow, which can be useful for solving the immediate problem, but might hide other stuff that hasn't been given room to breathe. Meetings like 1on1s and retrospectives are opportunities to take that break.
I don't need to "get something off my chest" every week, most people don't.
There is of course value to communication, but managers without better things to do are trying to have it far too frequently. It is also much easier to schedule meetings as needed and keep the frequency of the regularly scheduled ones on as long a period as possible.
I do know how easy it is to get in the zone as a developer, and subsequently feel frustrated that a useless meeting just popped up in the middle of your flow, but that's not a good reason to write off 1on1s entirely. Worst case your flow will be interrupted once a week. Two if your team has a weekly retrospective as well. If two interruptions per week is significantly damaging your productivity, something is wrong.
Personally, I am not a fan of meetings in general, and I do consider many of them to be useless. But 1on1s and retrospectives are the two that I mandate in the teams that I lead - one is for the health of my reports, and the other is for the health of the team. All other meetings can and should be optional. If someone is feeling snowed under by all the other meetings, then it's exactly during the 1on1 or retro when those feelings can be shared. If you don't have those meetings, then you're relying on everyone on the team to always speak up whenever they need help, and while that might work for certain, very assertive and/or self-centered employees, it doesn't work for everyone. For that reason I think it's important to schedule these times in deliberately to give people the opportunity to express themselves.
When there isn't a culture of open communication - which is established through regular meetings of this sort - many employees find it difficult to be honest about their challenges and difficulties (on the negative side) or goals and aspirations (on the positive side). In either case I believe it improves productivity and retention to give employees dedicated space to talk about that stuff.
If I have a standup at 10am every day, this guarantees that I'm not going to ever get anything substantial done before 10am. A 3pm weekly meeting can mostly destroy my ability to get in to deep work for that afternoon.
I don't "schedule" deep work, it is a thing that happens as a combination of what needs to be done, the time available, minor tasks, and interruptions.
Daily and weekly meetings significantly reduce the surface area available for these things to happen, and often serve as a source of boredom and frustration, being in a room with people who obviously don't have anything to say, saying words because they're supposed to.
The whole point of 1on1s and retrospectives is to optimize your work. If you literally only have these two meetings per week and you still find that unreasonably disruptive, then you could discuss dropping them to once a fortnight. If you still find those two meetings per fortnight unreasonably disruptive, and you really get absolutely zero benefit from them whatsoever, perhaps you should be working as an independent contractor and not a salaried employeee with a team of colleagues and a manager.
I do understand where you're coming from. I have had several direct reports who never had anything at all to say in their 1on1s, who had no interest in setting goals, no interest in advancing in the company, no interest in improving their workflow, who honestly just wanted to sit down, do the work, get paid, go home. That's fine, and it's useful to have some people on the team who want to work that way, but they really are a minority of people I have worked with in "normal" company environments. To be frank, I would prefer to work that way myself, but that's not really how most companies operate, because most companies are geared for growth, so it's not enough to just stay at the same level of productivity forever. The goal for most companies is to continuously improve and increase their output, forever. This is why most companies see value in having these meetings, because they are a way to focus employees on becoming ever more productive.
That escalated quickly.
Good points, though you're talking past each other a bit. (I'm not disagreeing about 121s' value nor flow's unschedulability.)
You should try it!
This really cuts to the point of what I’m trying to express. The general model of meetings is that they are there for exchanging information. One issue with this is something you’ve pointed out, that people feel compelled keep the meeting but there’s no information to share. So there’s just nothing.
There’s a second issue. There are things you can do through talking with another person that aren’t just sharing information. If you only see meetings as a way for information to change hands, you can’t see these options. I find it hard to put into words, but I’ll try to give some examples.
You could change how you feel about something by talking about it. A concern that is too scary to fully think about could be spoken about so you can face it. There’s value in talking about it that’s separate from the information sharing or even the problem solving.
You could generate ideas. One person creates space and the other fills it by coming up with new ideas.
You could understand something better by explaining it (see Duck, Rubber).
You could set an intention. Having the memory of telling someone you’ll do something may make you more likely to do it (separate from them holding you accountable).
You could practice what you’ll say in some other situation. Maybe one sided practice, maybe role play.
All of these are a sort of “talking as doing”. It’s a very different gear from “talking as information sharing”. I’ve found it can be really hard to get people to change those gears. It’s odd. It’s not like they’re directly resistant, they just seem unaware. It’s like someone holding their lunch in a park wondering where we’re going to eat. Here! Go ahead! I don’t want to hear about you being alive, I want to see it!
I don't need daily group therapy with my team or weekly individual therapy with my manager.
There's not that much to say, I can't invent that much to say, people rarely need that much communication.
I don't need to brainstorm ideas daily/weekly, don't need to set intentions. I often know what needs to be done for long stretches and am more than capable of communicating it ad hoc when it is most useful to communicate it. We have at our disposal half a dozen forms of communication, forced regular meetings can be the worst kind.
What's not fine is being forced to do them, unable to exit the waste of time.
Your argument refuting the OP would be stronger without the straw man argument against forced 1:1s
Look, I don't care if you do one on ones, standups, whatever. No need to tell me you don't need them. I don't even know you. I'm just trying to share some ideas with you and anyone reading.
Sometimes, often even, there just isn't anything
that needs to be said. I feel the same way about
standups and 1:1s.
Meetings should be treated like investments: by
spending the time of the participants, are you
going to reap the rewards of time saved in the future?
Let's assume a 40-hour work week. (lol, I know)
Daily standups should be <= 15 minutes. Let's also suppose we're doing biweekly 30 minute 1:1s.
That's 1.25 hours per week, combined. Of course the real productivity loss of a meeting can be greater if it pulls you out of a "flow" state. Let's assume some of these rituals also incur a "flow state interruption" penalty of 30 additional minutes of lost productivity. So the total productivity cost is 2-3 hours per week per team member, or roughly 6% of their theoretical productive time.
I think this is a reasonable overhead. Working on a team requires communication. This seems like an efficient way to do it.
What's the alternative? Communicate whenever you feel like it? That's extremely iffy to put it mildly even if everybody on the team is an amazing communicator, which is an extremely unlikely ideal state of affairs. Adding a little structure makes sure the communication actually happens.
There is value too in scheduling a 1on1 that is easy to cancel. It's easy enough to quickly check if it's necessary, if it isn't, no worries.
To make sure IC's remember managers have power. That's all there is to it. No real useful stuff gets done.
At the end of the day it's just two colleagues in a room, if you can't get anything done with that, there's either nothing to get done or you couldn't get it done.
1. This process requires trust from both parties. Often this doesn't exist, and manufacturing trust is basically impossible. This requires a happy and healthy workplace, and unfortunately, many people do not work in these.
2. This is an excellent opportunity to extract information from an employee which otherwise wouldn't see the light. I.e. are there issues which should be discussed? Things making them unhappy and unproductive? Is someone bullying them? Are their teammates dropping the ball? Are there problems in their teams I could help with? Are there problems at home? Do they need some time off so they're refreshed and ready to go afterwards? All of these things require, as above, trust. They can be used to great success. Sadly some workplaces formalise these and instead use 1:1s as a way to grade employees. This means the employee is extremely unlikely to expose any kind of weakness or vulnerability.
3. Shooting the shit isn't usually productive (but can build rapport). Likewise, status updates are not necessarily productive when a status email will do. The purpose is to dig deeper. Inasmuch, I have a OneNote dedicated for my 1:1 where I record thoughts and ideas throughout the week. I select a few of these during the 1:1 to dig into. Sometimes nothing eventuates. Sometimes they become larger discussions.
You should really listen to the Manager Toolbox podcast on 1:1s (there's 3 segments, all of them very worth the time):
https://www.manager-tools.com/2005/07/the-single-most-effect...
Basically, that "time sucking" activity with trivial conversation is actually what helps people build a [professional] relationship with their bosses/reportees. From my experience, it is an error to use the 1:1 to check every week how work is going. There's a lot of other channels for that (including the dreaded daily standup). As I mentioned to my reportees: "One on Ones are to talk about anything you want, particularly, company/office stuff that is not part of your day to day job. If you want to tell me about someone that smells bad, this is the place, or about the water dispenser that never works, etc". Of course if someone wants to tell talk to you about work, it is also great.
Specially on remote-work scenarios, having weekly "how are you" calls is important to pull the members of a team closer to the team.
Good point, although as a manager I take that (listening to what is bothering my employees) as my job. That's literally what the company is paying me to do. So I will be happy to listen to their problems and see how I can help them solve them.
I have little to say to my current boss most weeks. I just keep my platform running independently, so he gets to trust me to do so and ignore it. It is a good working relationship. Our weekly calls are 5 minutes long, just a quick check in and move on. Until they are not - and then we raise concerns, talk them through, fix them, and go back to the regularly scheduled program.
Each individual 1:1 is fairly worthless. But the habit makes all the difference in the long run.
Daily stand-ups are mostly also not really that useful - but getting team together so they are used to at least 15-20 mins talking to each other I believe has benefits anyway.
The same with writing unit tests, I see my team is writing too many useless unit tests. But then if we have habit of writing tests - important tests will get written as well. If we would skip tests and say that we write only "important ones" then I saw that no tests were written in period where we had such an approach.
This is my feeling. Wouldn't a weekly meeting where we don't need to stand up be sufficient for this?
I guess it depends on the people and how they function. And how the team communicates throughout the day or the week.
It's so you don't get blindsided out of nowhere with "I'm leaving for Facebook now" or "Sorry, your project is canceled" or "We're not happy with how things are going, so you're now on a PIP."
It's the same reason to say "Good morning" and "I love you" to your spouse every day and buy them flowers - by itself, it's inconsequential, but if you don't you'll likely hear "I'm leaving you for your best friend" in a decade or two. Same reason, for that matter, that people are looking at America now and going "What the hell happened?" Trust and emotions are real things too.
When done properly, 1:1s are powerful. But they require at least one side to be willing to be vulnerable. To talk about problems and weaknesses and needs. That doesn’t come naturally to most of us, and requires practice and intent to become habit.
A direct report may try a couple of times to go deeper or be vulnerable but if the manager isn’t receptive that 1:1 just became perfunctory into perpetuity.
I'm a very candid person and I have no issues saying exactly what's on my mind when I'm comfortable.
I've hardly ever seen my managers speak anything but the party line. I can't get comfortable talking about issues with someone who doesn't believe there are problems.
In particular, you mention "time-sucking status updates". In my experience, often someone thinks you want a status report, but from your point of view you are sufficiently aware of the project status already. As the manager, you can just politely suggest that you are already happy with the project status, and move on to other topics.
Some of the most effective 1x1s are either when the manager has a tough problem to solve, or the report has a tough problem to solve, and the 1x1 can be some focused time to detect these problems and resolve them. This can be anywhere from a technical issue that this report has some expertise in, or a social issue like "I feel like it's been taking a while to reach an agreement among the team on topic X, how do you think we can speed that up?" Or perhaps you notice that a report seems frustrated on a project, but you aren't quite sure why, and you can use the 1:1 to draw that out.
I find it helpful to take notes ahead of time, with some ideas for myself for what I might be able to accomplish with a 1:1. Otherwise you run the risk of not really knowing what to say, your report doesn't really have anything urgent in mind either, and you fill up the 1:1 time with chit chat.
I really like this blog post on how to run effective 1:1s:
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-update-the-vent-and-t...
Running an effective 1:1 is an important managerial skill, it's something you can practice and improve at over time, and it's worth working at it since there is so much you can accomplish through 1:1s and you're likely spending a lot of time as a manager in them.
Not every aspect of productivity in a company is about completing a specific task.
One on ones where we make small talk about the weekend are useless to me. One on ones where we can talk through a technical topic I don't understand and I know I have at least a half hour of time to do so with someone who knows the topic well? Very helpful.
Most of the time its only tangentially related to anything I've been working on.
I've also had one on ones with small team leaders, who knew their people and knew their jobs and understood their motivations that were SUPER helpful. Even if it meant preparing those people to leave the company. That's the difference between a good manager and a bad manager. That's also why I like working in small teams. We gel faster, work closer together and get to know our manager (even though that manager is me, right now). I've tried to learn from my former managers and bring that to my team of a few people and try to shield them from as much corporate BS that I can. That isn't their job. They look at code (as do I, when I can), and I go to meetings and deal with that. And when members of my team seem interested in other things (and mention it in one on ones), I try to help them with that. That's what they're supposed to be for. Not just poor performance... hopefully. Maybe I've just gotten lucky.
You could ask for suggestions how to do your job. But your job is your job, not your lead's. The best they can do is offer some heuristics. Ultimately, there should be some planning or engineering review process where you work, and a one-on-one with your lead is a crappy substitute.
You could ask your lead to share confidential information about upcoming changes at the company, such as a senior departure or a team reorg. This only happens because senior leadership has asked your lead to share this info one on one, not because you have an intimate relationship of trust.
A one-on-one is sometimes useful to me when I'm the lead, because my direct reports might tell me something they aren't comfortable bringing up in stand-up: a deadline is slipping, they're unhappy with a teammate, etc. It's very useful for me to know this stuff. But the action I take as a result very rarely benefits that employee directly. It's just me collecting intel.
Anything of value or importance has to be written down, it is a short objective statement, usually a few lines. And then pursuing those over time (1 to several weeks or months) and having accountability check-ins. This would make 1:1s very formal and 1:1s usually seem better as casual conversations.
? Nobody would ever suggest that you should feel that way, or that an individual 1x1 would be singularly effective.
When you go Heli-skiing, you ski with a partner, and you're constantly shouting out to your partner to let the know where you are. Primarily, you do this because of the various kinds of danger, especially avalanches. That those things are unlikely does not abnegate the need for communication.
One thing never made obvious in films or popular culture is the amount of communication in the military. 1/2 of the game is communicating. It's information, which is the basis of coordination, which is the basis of management of force. A 'radio' is as important as one's 'rifle'. A rifle can defend you against one person; a radio connects you with the totality of the power of the system you are in.
The point is it's a form of systematic communication which I would overwhelmingly support.
Especially the bit about 'open ended' - my gosh there are so many details lost in the normal operative aspects it's almost scary.
'Status Updates' are generally not meaningless, it's one of the means that people use to coordinate, though they can be cumbersome.
Wasted time in meetings is definitely endemic, at the same time, a lot of complaint is sometimes rooted in the lack of understanding of the nature of one unit within the larger system.
As developers, we feel that our 'code' is our productivity, but it's like the 'rifle' - it's just the obvious thing. The 'radio' is the other key thing.
Also - the 'performance' bits are probably overdone. It's extremely hard to change habits. You can definitely get people to do things like adjust to a coding style, but it gets hard past that. I'm more of the view of just trying to leverage what people are already good at because most people are good at 'something'. But merely as 'coordination', these things are important.
Especially with direct managers, there needs to be fairly consistent communication, which is different FYI from large team meetings of which there are probably too many.
1-on-1's are very effective. No single 1-on-1 is going to feel particularly effective.