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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> Search the net for questions / topics to manage up in 1-1s.

This is why so many people find themselves in performative 1 on 1s: It's assumed that the time must be spent, so managers and reports alike start searching for things to fill up that time.

The best 1 on 1 formats I've had were quick and to the point. We cancelled or ended early if there was nothing to discuss that hadn't already been discussed.

The worst were a game of finding things to talk about for 50 minutes because some manager read a few management books and decided they must fill up the time to bond with employees. So we'd go through silly questions from lists from books or do bonding exercises while I had to pretend to smile and enjoy it.

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It is totally acceptable to use a list of questions to give you ideas for what to talk about. You might learn something you didn’t know if you didn’t ask.

For example, most managers aren’t having “career” convos with their people regularly. It’s fine to use a question bank if it helps you kick this convo off and get to the heart of the matter.

If your 1-1s have been performative, I guess shame on either the manager, you, or both.

If you’re scheduling meetings without an idea of what to talk about, that’s a problem.

Looking up ideas to discuss with your manager is a good idea. If you are being scheduled for time slots and have to search for ideas to fill it every week, that’s a symptom of a broken meeting that should be reduced in time, frequency, or both.

> I guess shame on either the manager, you, or both.

This culture of shaming people who aren’t doing the performative thing of filling up the meeting time is why so many of us are so tired of this rigid 1:1 dogma. Business and communication practices should meet the team’s needs, not be a game of following steps you found on the Internet about what to talk about in meetings.

Schedule meetings when communication is needed. Stop wasting everyone’s time by searching the internet for conversation ideas for arbitrary meetings.

question bank ?! lol, no wonder people complain about being performative.

If you have nothing to talk about, cancel it

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