One-on-ones are regular meetings between an employee and his/her line manager. They are possibly the most important tool that managers have to do their work. Google found that time-tested technique (check this very good overview from 2005) to be a key habit of effective managers.
Why do 1-on-1s?
Two main reasons: first, for the manager and employee to develop their relationship by exposing the manager to what is going on in the employee’s world, his progress, issues, challenges, objectives and motivation. Second, to provide a forum for the manager to give clear, frequent feedback and to coach the employee on the right behaviours (and sometimes vice-versa!).
If you are a manager and don’t do 1-on-1s, you should. If as an employee you don’t have 1-on-1s with your manager, insist on inviting him/her to a regular meeting, it will be worth it.
How
The 1-on-1s I have seen or heard of tend to follow a common pattern: 30- to 60-minute long, every 1 or 2 weeks (sometimes monthly) and with some form of prepared agenda. Beyond this, 1-on-1s are more an art than a science and come in plenty of flavours and quality.
One aspect to consider is who should own these meeting: are they yours (the manager) to run as assumed in this piece on coaching sessions? Or are they rather the employee’s forum to speak up to you, as explained by Ben Horowitz? I prefer looking at 1-on-1s as shared meetings, with an agenda that both manager and employee contribute to ahead of time (a Google Doc works great for this).
Still if you use a prepared agenda (and whoever’s it is) make sure to have time for freeform discussions. That is, time when you ignore the agenda and have a general, unstructured chat, during which you can pick up on hints and signals (e.g. strong words like ‘hate’, ‘broken’) and dig into them to find out what’s not being said. This very good list also provides plenty of great topics to explore.
So are 1-on-1s all about a manager questioning an employee? Not quite - as a manager you may also be challenged onto difficult topics. See this good post from Michael Lopp. These are usually good opportunities to resolve conflict, learn something new (about your team or yourself) and is really a core part of your work as a manager. Do encourage 'your' people to bring up these challenging discussions if they don't happen regularly.
Not just for your direct reports
One-on-ones are a powerful tool that can be used in other contexts.
The team you manage most likely interacts with other teams. Dev teams for example often work with Product, Marketing and Support teams when they build new features. Wouldn't it be useful for you to have 1-on-1s with the managers of these other teams? These peer 1-on-1s would serve a different purpose from your usual 1-on-1s, such as improving cross-team communication, resolving blockers or learning from each other as managers. Quite similarly, you can organise peer 1-on-1s within your team.
Assuming that you are managing managers, are you confident that your current 1-on-1s are enough to really know what is happening 'on the ground'? A solution is to conduct skip-level 1-on-1s, where once a month you sit down with one of your employees’ employees - a different person each time. This type of 1-on-1s also helps promote a culture of openness in management.
While at Brandwatch, I got into a similar habit of sitting down with all new Engineering staff a week after they joined. This was great to see how they were doing, and to check that our induction process was working. It fits within what is called doing the unscalable thing - probably worth expanding on in another post.
Yes, this can all amount to a lot of meetings. So stick to a reasonable frequency and duration, steer away from the trivial and minutiae and focus instead on what is the most valuable: new learnings, key actions on specific issues, and improved behaviours.
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