How to get the most out of your 1:1s

I really struggle with 1:1s primarily because:<p>1. Do you want career growth?<p>No, and its hard to tell that to my manager. More growth leads to more responsibility, which is more stress. I&#x27;m happy where I am and I don&#x27;t want promotions.<p>I&#x27;m afraid to tell my manager that, because which manager wants an unambitious engineer? There was someone like that on our team and he was laid off in the last layoff round, so I have to &quot;pretend&quot; I&#x27;m working towards the next level.<p>2. Do you want more interesting work?<p>Also no, I&#x27;m perfectly happy maintaining our current codebase, not interested in new and shiny projects because my most interesting time is spent at home with my kiddo.<p>Any tips on how I can handle my 1:1s?

My situation is as follows. I joined my current company 1 year ago; my team is composed of 5 people (data scientists, engineers, 1 product manager) and it is within an area (there are like 10 areas, and each area has around 2 to 3 teams). Alongside my team, there is another team in my area. There is only one engineer manager for the whole area (so, like 8 engineers to &quot;manage&quot;).<p>I have 1:1s every 2 weeks with my engineer manager... and that&#x27;s basically 99% of the contact I have with them. My eng. manager rarely attends my team&#x27;s sprint plannings (or any other Scrum ceremony like retros, standups, etc.). We rarely (if any) discuss long-term technical planning&#x2F;ideas&#x2F;solutions. They know which products we maintain and in what we are working on, but not much more.<p>In the 1:1 we are very open, but it always feels like &quot;this is something we have to do, let&#x27;s carry on with it&quot;. They always recommend me some blogs, conferences, sometimes books... but to be honest I&#x27;m quite past that phase in my career: it&#x27;s not that I don&#x27;t appreciate recommendations, it&#x27;s that I have been working for more than 10 years in the industry and I have pretty much clear what&#x27;s my &quot;career path&quot;, and it doesn&#x27;t depend on engineer managers (my &quot;career path&quot; is to keep being an IC, doing a good job, not getting too attached to companies... and switch jobs every 3 years or so).<p>Seems to me that the job of the engineer manager is just too lightweight. We hire them people because they have two things: a) good people skills, and b) a good track of experience working on tech. We never get to &quot;use&quot; my engineer manager for point b, and point a is summarized as &quot;let&#x27;s have a good chat every 2 weeks&quot;.

Yeah, I’ve been finding my one on ones useless recently, and this article seems to have some more useless “wisdom” here summed up in a nice package. Kind of annoying to me that the writer implies the one on one is for me to fill his valuable time. I’m loving my work, don’t have any issues with my coworkers, and like my current position. I really don’t have critical feedback to bring to the table every one on one. To be honest, if everything is going smoothly, all I can do is talk about what I’m excited to work on next and how life is going. Which is a status update.<p>By the way, I found the “figure out my problems and solve them” line very rich. Every morning we have a standup where my manager tells me what his main concerns are and then I change my priority of work to keep his stress (and thus mine) low on whatever the new issue is. That’s generally how managers and employees work. You’re probably doing something very wrong or are very green if you don’t know what your managers chief stressors and concerns are, because I have no idea how you’d manage your work properly otherwise.

I also think the managers should come with conversation starters to these meetings. Be curious about what your reports do and proactively ask them about something specific they did last month and anything they can do to improve. Coming with a blank slate because you think you are doing someone a favor by giving them your time will always lead to status updates or awkward silences.

I have seen 1:1s used more strategically by employees who have 1on1 with managers outside their team. These employees often get promoted quickly. Note, at performance review time, employees are stacked against each other. If the other managers know you well and are giving you advice then chances are they won&#x27;t push back if your manager ranks you highly. In addition, employees are ranked by how much they influence others so it helps to have a relationship with the other team leads and to know their goals. Furthermore, some managers don&#x27;t care about their direct report&#x27;s careers so having a 1on1 with another manager gives you a chance to get advice that your manager might not want you to know. For example, your manager most likely will not tell you how to be promoted above him&#x2F;her; if you talk to another manager you can learn this.

I used to have a boss who’d ask me to rate my company satisfaction with the company 1-10 at every 1:1. This always struck me as one of the laziest&#x2F;misguided management moves I’ve encountered, and I’m sure he felt it was both accurate and clever. If you manage people, and don’t understand that basic power dynamics will always trump encouragements for “openness”, you are naive at best and willfully blind at worst.

They’re basically kabuki nonsense like most of corporate America. No one benefits but everyone goes through the motions.

I’m in a similar position and have a more connected approach. I always have an idea of what my direct reports are up to, and a high level understanding of what their reports are up to. I always have 3-4 discussion items ready, these are usually about whatever is important for the business at the time that intersect with their line of work.<p>I start with their agenda. They would’ve seen me how I prepare mine before, so usually they would have a similar agenda. I listen to them, discuss, and create action items together. Then we talk through my agenda, and we end with their thoughts as well since they might have just remembered something or it might have come up during my items.<p>I also make sure the items contain their development and also try to understand if their reports are developing in the direction they want and how I can help.<p>For myself, I do not find it useful to offload the responsibility of a productive 1-1 to my reports. It is both of ours, and since I have more experience in this, I behave as such and they are usually encouraged by it and start doing the same.

I&#x27;ve led large orgs and fucked it up a few times in the beginning.<p>My #1 best recommendation for those starting out is to always tell your direct reports that this is their time and you guys can talk about whatever is on your mind. Like the article says, make sure you verbalize this is not a status update meeting. What&#x27;s obvious to you is not obvious to them.<p>If you guys run out of topics to chop up, I also recommend asking for advice from your direct report about any subject that&#x27;s on your mind. It builds rapport.

It&#x27;s strange how so many informal conversations have become formalized.<p>Phone call? Book a calendar invite. Talk to your manager? Schedule a one-on-one. Want to raise a technical comment? Issue a Jira ticket.<p>Not to say that this is all bad, but wondering if it&#x27;s really helpful.

Here&#x27;s some tips to better 1:1s on-top of what the article mentions:<p>- If you&#x27;re a direct manager in the 1:1, it is your job to take notes. Period.<p>- 1:1s are business meetings about results, and sometimes personal matters are discussed.<p>- If you have role power, you need to be cautious with what you say during a 1:1. People will take things literally.<p>- Agendas should be simple. 10 minutes you, 10 minutes me, 10 minutes for the future. Most important thing first, always.<p>- To start a 1:1, make a statement or a question, sometimes the small talk is not wanted or dreaded. &quot;How&#x27;s it going&quot;, &quot;How are you&quot;, &quot;How are things&quot; are all valid.<p>- Don&#x27;t come with an agenda to a 1:1. People hate not being able to contribute.<p>- If you setup 1:1s as a tool to get to know the team members you work with regularly, follow a simple 15 minutes you, 15 minutes me type of deal. (Especially if you&#x27;re a PM, TPM, or EM working with another discipline)

Why even bother with a monthly 1:1, that&#x27;s almost insulting to the employee. If I had major concerns a month is far too long to wait to see action and have them resolved. You&#x27;re telling your employee that of the ~160 work-hours in a month they are worth less than one of them.

How to get the most out of your 1:1s: cancel them. ;) You almost never need a recurring one and talking about something if&#x2F;when it&#x27;s relevant and in context is always better.

One-to-ones seem like yet another of these cargo-culted management trends that add needless ceremony and develop into an end-in-themselves. At least anywhere that I&#x27;ve been that&#x27;s tried to implement them.<p>We chew up an amazing amount of time on this kind of theater.

The idea of a monthly one on one scheduled meeting is rediculous.<p>If you are not talking to all your people every day as a matter of course, they are basically unmanaged. For the love of god don&#x27;t schedule any meetings. You shouldn&#x27;t need to since you are just part of your employees flow of work.<p>The employee &#x2F; manager relationship should be one in which either party can feel free to just raise any concern the moment that it comes up. Meetings are <i>not</i> how that occurs.

How often do you all have 1:1’s with manager. I’ve been in industry 15+ years and meet with my manager once or maybe twice a month, which seems reasonable. I’m fairly self sufficient and don’t need a lot assistance. Some of my peers at the same company and are also quite experienced have to meet with their manager weekly for 1:1’s. They remark to me that they don’t get a lot of value out of them being that frequent.

I have 1 on 1s too and we talk about anything at all, including status updates if the employee wants too. Because it all builds a connection. It&#x27;s like a coffee chat.<p>I think it works the best when it&#x27;s completely open to anything at all.

Completely unimportant, but anyone else call them <i>one to ones</i>?<p>Where did this <i>one on one</i> thing come from? A one on one is a boxing match or a schoolyard fight, not an open chat.<p>8:2:1 is a ratio of cocktail ingredients. 16:9 is an aspect ratio. 1:7 is a steep hill to climb. <i>To</i>, <i>by</i>, and <i>in</i> respectively. The latter two would be weird choices but at least they’d be consistent with the syntax of x:y. “on” though?! Where did that come from?<p>Don’t say “Japanese poetry” :)

I try to run these as casually as possible on no specific timeline. I find regular, standardized 1:1s to be a dystopian experience.<p>The way most of my 1:1 calls initiate usually starts with someone else on the team expressing a bad mood about something and me doing a quick check in on teams.<p>I find that happy or otherwise productive employees will either reach out actively on their own, or not require this sort of interaction in the first place.

I used to be an inexperienced manager as I expect many managers are these days and my 1:1s were a waste of time. I didn&#x27;t really know what to do, constructive criticism and suggestions are really hard to do - I found it really hard to say what I really thought. However as an employee you should be asking about how to stand out in the team and &quot;make a difference&quot;.

I enjoy my 1:1s with my manager. It&#x27;s pretty relaxed, open ended conversation. Recently she asked us all to just do a summary in OneNote of what we did for the week, so that kind of gives us things to talk about. Typically we talk about personal life, family things for about half of the meeting and work the other half.

Found this useful 1:1 template a while back: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;giddy-amusement-c74.notion.site&#x2F;Manage-your-manager-26a26b82bd824f97bf44de754d79a94f" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;giddy-amusement-c74.notion.site&#x2F;Manage-your-manager-...</a>

The problem I have with 1:1s is that I don&#x27;t trust my manager so I never have them. Previous attempts to get things resolved with management have always gone poorly for me so I don&#x27;t even bother to try anymore.

As an English person in Silicon Valley, I considered them an unpleasant &#x27;cost of doing business&#x27; as I went about bagging the absurd paycheck. The trip lasted rather longer than I expected, to be honest!

You guys get to have 1:1s? This reminds me of a site I&#x27;ve found a few years ago that mapped out all the universities in the area and listed the contact info of the on campus psychologist.<p>Ours redirected to a big fat 404.

one good way to &#x27;get the conversation going&#x27;, as well as provide invaluable feedback, is to reverse roles and start the session with the employee review of <i>your</i> own performance as their manager. You can even say &#x27;hey, this 1:1 is for me rather than you!&#x27;. It&#x27;s fun and serious at the same time, and if you do it without ego you can learn a lot about how you are impacting your employees work, what you need to do to make a more conducive environment for them to thrive.

I&#x27;m starting a new EM role at a new company later this month. I&#x27;ve been a team lead for several years, at different companies and different teams, but this is my first &quot;traditional&quot; management role. I have my own thoughts, but I&#x27;d love to hear from others about what the better managers they&#x27;ve had in the past have [not] done.<p>If it matters, it sounds like I am backfilling a position for someone who took a director position in a different part of the organization.

There is a great community driven list [0] of 1 on 1 questions that I like to pick a couple questions as conversation starters or as backup when the conversation goes stale. It is also available as JSON so you can script the random selection.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;VGraupera&#x2F;1on1-questions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;VGraupera&#x2F;1on1-questions</a>

&gt; At Devetry, we run pretty flat, so I have a lot of direct reports, and we only meet once a month.<p>Aside from the elsewhere-mentioned “once a month is basically being unmanaged”, the idea that a lot of direct reports is “flat” and not “managers stretched way too thin” is kind of glaring.

Obligatory Roger Sterling quote [1]:<p>&gt; I don&#x27;t know if anyone&#x27;s ever told you that half the time this business comes down to &#x27;I don&#x27;t like that guy.&#x27;<p>What articles like these fail to realize or fail to point to is that a lot of your work outcomes come down to whether your manager likes you, their manager likes you and your coworkers like you. This isn&#x27;t universal of course. There are some people who are disliked but clearly brilliant enough for it to matter. These people are the exception not th enorm.<p>At Google, there was a meme in performance review that goes something like:<p>&gt; This project would&#x27;ve failed without this person. It failed anyway but it definitely would&#x27;ve without them.<p>You can take the same set of circumstances and interpret them differently based on who you like and who you don&#x27;t. Project fails? Someone you like did what they could for the team. Someone you don&#x27;t didn&#x27;t contribute enough. Project succeeds? Person you like was a key reason why. Person you don&#x27;t wasn&#x27;t.<p>So when it comes to 1:1s, if your manager likes you you&#x27;re more likely to be someone they advocate for, extol the virtues of your accomplishments and so on. If your manager is liked the more likely their opinions are to carry weight.<p>So how to get the most value of your 1:1s? Figure out if your manager likes you and figure out if their managers likes them.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;madmenqts&#x2F;status&#x2F;783648743690231808?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;madmenqts&#x2F;status&#x2F;783648743690231808?lang...</a>

I know this article and comments here are mostly related to 1:1s with your boss. But I also use them in a not boss related situation, like scheduled 1:1s with an architect or ux designer if they are not fully assigned to a team.

I would love to not have 1on1s. They are awkward, and I don&#x27;t see a point, besides ticking some box in manager sheet.<p>I&#x27;m introvert (probably like large part of soft eng).

A good barometer for when a meeting is likely ineffective is when it’s given a catchy name. 1:1, f2f, all hands, etc.<p>That and when it’s a recurring meeting that has no end-date.

What I don&#x27;t like is when I as the employer need to take the initiative to do the 1 on 1 and then do it with the feeling like I&#x27;m wasting my bosses time.

I take notes throughout the week of what I want to discuss during the 1:1 and pretty much every other upcoming meeting.

Yet another manager not knowing what being a manager is. It is your responsibility to know what your reports are doing and making sure their efforts are recognised and their flaws corrected (or ultimately fired). If you don&#x27;t remember unless someone keeps sending you self promotional messages, you are the problem, not your reports.

Who is &quot;you&quot; in this article? Is this written for his employees?

I&#x27;ve seen it all. From hobbies to marital problems.

The OP seems largely inline with what I wrote about some of my thoughts on 1:1s here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codeleadmanage.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20210118-how_to_effective_one_on_ones.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codeleadmanage.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20210118-how_to_effe...</a><p>My TL;DR is every manager needs to develop their own strategy. The best way to do this is to start, experiment and iterate, but hopefully there&#x27;s some conventions and ideas that can help.

Our company policy about 1:1 is pretty similar to what is outlined in this article.

The fact that the 1:1s are monthly makes me question how much the author really knows about managing people.