In theory, you don’t need 1:1s. In practice, if you don’t have them, some people will bottle up minor irritations until they become serious problems. 1:1s are a release valve for that. You can’t rely on everybody to proactively reach out when there’s a problem.

Also:

> The best teams will self-organize

Part of being a good manager is being able to manage suboptimal teams. It sure would be nice to hand-wave away problems with “the best teams don’t do that”, but you aren’t always dealing with the happy path.

I agree. My experience is that regularly scheduled 1:1s without an agenda seem to turn into therapy sessions for a surprising amount of people. I like doing ad-hoc 1:1s with specific agendas though, such as pair programming or an architecture session for an issue an Engineer is starting to work on.