Gonna donate some HN karma here and offer my opinion that this article is MBA-tier horseshit. Your girlfriend and you do not have "one on one"s. You talk about your lives and listen to each other like a normal fucking couple. Framing a normal relationship like a business practice feels like she's less a girlfriend and more a patient. Saying that you want to solve her problems with normal spousal communication makes you sound like her dad.
The more you try to sell me on your GENIUS business practice, the less I believe that you know what effective management entails.
My wife and I do have a weekly one on one. It’s on our shared calendar for 8:45PM every Sunday. We call it a ‘check-in’ because 1:1 feels like unnecessary corporate speak in the context of our marriage.
It’s a chance for us to talk through what went well and what went poorly over the last week. Having it on the calendar as a regular activity means that it never feels like we’re calling the other person out on something, and it means that we never just let it slide because we’re busy with something else.
We’ve been doing it for over a year and a half and have only missed it once when she was at a conference.
I would follow up by saying that one-on-ones are pretty useless even in a business setting. I have had only one boss in my career where I felt like I actually got real personal career advice during my one-on-ones with him. Every other boss I've had has treated one-on-ones as just another status meeting.
I think the problem is the scheduled nature of it. If there were actually something to discuss (like maybe I'm not delivering what I should be, or I'm working on something that's not the highest priority) then by all means, I'm glad to hear that feedback. But all too often managers just have one-on-ones because they're on the schedule, not because there's anything to discuss. In those case, it just devolves into a discussion of the current project and me repeating what I've repeated already in sprint planning, daily standups and weekly status e-mails.
I had 1-2-1 with different employers, I learned with some that I was a very pessimistic person and others that I was a very optimistic person. Variation basically boils down to whatever impression your manager wants to have of you.
The 1-2-1 is usually not very useful if I have to sit through a scripted conversation. Nowadays I use 1-2-1 for my own purpose. I angle the conversation towards what I want to learn or talk about, and that's it. I am keeping it short, precise and am not trying to tell my manager too much, because sometimes they read too much between the lines.
It can be a great place to exchange knowledge but make sure you have some ground rules in place.
I think a more charitable interpretation of the article would be that this is largely an argument for the effectiveness of talking to people rather than trying to treat every interaction as you might as a manager at work.
"You talk about your lives and listen to each other like a normal fucking couple."
I agree that the author's approach seems to ooze a creepy sort of clinical mental dissection, but using "a normal fucking couple" as your relationship aspiration is a recipe for disaster.
The biggest benefit to 1:1 is that the under person feels heard. Everything else is fluff. That said, the power of feeling like your voice is not silent is VERY important for most people in their work and having audience with their boss for even 20 minutes a week can help fill in gaps that matter.
In my experience (having been through about a half-dozen 1:1s from the lower-level employee side at large corparations) is any complaint I raised in one, however professionally, is/was treated as a "morale issue with scottLobster" rather than an actual potential issue worth investigating.
Which on one hand is fair given the nature of the meeting. Actually providing resources necessitates more scrutiny than a 1:1 could provide. On the other hand knowing that the root cause of my "morale issue" will likely not be addressed (given an established track record) makes me less likely to raise it and give a non-committal "yeah everything's going as good as can be expected, hit a few snags but we really pulled through and it felt really good to finally push through that issue [subtext: which never would have occurred in the first place if you'd listened to 80% of the senior engineers on the program 8 months ago, never mind what I think]...". At which point the exchange can be boiled down to "Are you going to quit without notice or shoot up the office? No? Great!"
Maybe I've just had bad experiences, but the 1:1s described in the article basically define a strong personal mentor/mentee relationship, and I've never gotten or witnessed that from any formal business process (in this case a periodic, corporate-prescribed 1:1 on a large program where each manager has lots of direct reports).
I feel your pain. My manager treat problems I mention as just my problems and not as a team/culture problem that I am particularly vocal about. My current manager views me so negatively right now that they have criticized me every 1:1 for the past month. I wish I didn't have to talk to them anymore at this point.
Having them feel heard helps. Actually solving some of the issues they raise helps a lot more.
I inherited a small department from another (over-committed) manager. Productivity and satisfaction has skyrocketed and I lay most of that purely on the fact that when we do one-on-one meetings, I'm realistic with people about what we can accomplish but whatever we agree is realistic actually gets followed up on. We're not just setting goals for them, but for me too, and I hold myself just as accountable to those goals as I hold them to their goals.
Someone who listens is a manager. Someone who listens and holds themselves accountable to making their employees able to be productive is a leader.
i think you hit the nail on the head here. some weeks, devs do just need a rant. but there's very few things as patronising as 1:1s when nothing changes. because then it's basically forced smalltalk with a nice little interruption. devs will notice this sooner or later, and morale suffers.
The article is an excellent case for why you should stop working and spend time doing not-work with not-coworkers.
You don't need scheduled 1:1s. You need to have a conversation. You don't need to have a manager/report relationship, you can just be invested in someone and have empathy.
I think that the parent is talking about outside work but I want to flag something else here.
> In many orgs it isnt practical not a good idea to be invested in a person beyond the work you do together.
There are many difficult complications to relationships in a corporate. In the limit you might have to dismiss the person you have a friendship with, or choose between doing that and leaving the company (and your salary and reputation) yourself.
But, relationships at work are not zero sum games and you need to be careful to think through the risks in terms of probabilities - getting pushed into sacking good people is a rare situation (unless something is really, really wrong) - and to be able to mitigate these corner cases (like, no, I'm not doing that, I will get another job thank you).
I hear that in prison it is a bad idea to get involved in any relationships at all, unless you are going to go all in and commit to whatever gang or romance is on the table. Work isn't like that, there are tools to manage how work relationships evolve, you are not trapped and powerless - although many work contexts set up a dynamic to convince you that you are. Ask yourself: how many of my co-workers have left in the last five years? How many of them are dead now? When was the last shanking in the restaurant? Yes, if you have young children you need to be very resilient and put up with bullshit that you simply wouldn't otherwise, but even then take steps like investing an hour a week in developing a way out, I have seen people really surprise themselves with how many options they can generate over time.
And the rewards are significant. If you have a strong network at work you can expect better projects, better information about politics and prospects, help when you need it and also feedback about you and your contribution. All of these are immensely valuable.
Ask yourself: how many of my co-workers have left in the last five years?
Literally all of them, and that's in the past year alone. I'll be out of here soon, too. I have zero investment in this firm, I'm just here putting in my 9-5 while working on personal projects and studying for interviews.
Really? I found quite the opposite to be true. Once we had drinks with our manager discussing our lives in general and it gave him a much better understanding of how we approach things generally in life and he was able to get so much more out of us , not my manipulating, but rather by being straight forward about the way we think and how we can open our minds to various opinions.
Of course he did'nt have to do it, and of course the wrong person could have taken advantage (like by manipulating) but being a great manager as he is, it definitely boosted the team productivity and cohesion
Frequent 1:1s with the devs are probably a sure way to implement the manager's vision and work style. On the way it'll also make the manager solve all the conflicts.
Doing no 1:1s means devs come up with the work styles that fit best to them, learn to solve conflicts with no manager present and possibly be more effective and creative. Many 1:1s seems just like an excuse for introducing deep micro management
For what it's worth, I've asked the members of my team if they'd like scheduled one-on-ones or not. And that either way they should feel free to grab my time/attention any time they should need it.
Personally, I'd prefer if people just reached out when they needed it (and hopefully then ideas would stay fresh) instead of waiting for 1:1s.
Turns out different people like different things. I ended up doing scheduled 1:1s across the board every other week. In practice it ended up being something like a "minimum threshold" for how frequently we had 1:1s. If we'd been working on something closely we could skip them if they'd want to.
Disclaimer: I wasn't the manager, just the most senior engineer on that team.
I see no evidence whatsoever for any effectiveness, let alone 'unreasonable' for one-on-ones. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, you should, but no magic is going to happen.
Apologies for the rant, but boy do I hate 1:1s -- maybe even more than daily stand-ups. It's the epitome of cargo-cult corporate Kool-aid†. If this article doesn't convince you that one-on-ones are nonsense, I don't know what will. Let's see what the author, a proponent of 1:1s, uses them on:
1) Personal habits and self-improvements
Personal habits and self-improvement are (at best) tangentially related to your professional life. Are you seriously saying I should be talking to my manager about my struggles trying to go to the gym more often? About my passion for painting? Or that side-project I'm trying to get off the ground? More often than not, this seems like professional suicide. Your manager is not your friend.
2) Project management
Unfortunately, this is basically status quo. Yes, most one-on-ones will devolve into PM discussions -- what's getting done, when's it getting done, what's the progress of X or Y, etc. Why one-on-ones aren't really the place to talk about these things is because I already have weekly status meetings with my team, daily stand-ups, and monthly roadmap check-ins, also with my team. So if you talk about project management in a 1:1, it's a complete waste of time.
3) Communication
Author writes: "In addition to improving the form of my communication, I also learned a lot about how to improve my communication habits..."
Most people learn this by high school. I mean, if you're a functioning adult at a grown-up job, some decorum, emotional intelligence, and context come with the territory. But then again, point taken: most of us do work in tech. I don't know about you, but I don't need a weekly 30-minute lesson in communication. My parents already did a pretty good job: I'm polite, responsive, and professional.
4) Alignment
I'm not sure how conflict resolution does anyone any good unless all conflicting parties are present. If I've got a disagreement with X, it seems we should probably hash it out in a meeting with X (sure, maybe with a manager present), but what do I know. And wait.. you need a regular one-on-one meeting on the books for this? How often do you get in conflicts at work?
5) Uncertainties
Author writes: "for instance, occasionally I’d get worried about some strategically important project elsewhere in the company because they’d forgotten to announce progress reports on it..."
Why?Why are you worried about things you can't control in a company you don't own? Besides, I'm not sure how your manager -- who also might have no idea -- could ease your worries. Either way, this also seems like a waste of time for one-on-ones (and, to be frank, a non-issue altogether).
†The fact that the author believes corporate-style one-on-ones are part of the key to a healthy relationship is, in my opinion, doubly offensive. A relationship is about empathy, love, care, and longevity. Besides, a one-on-one is defined by being run by your supervisor. What he was doing with his girlfriend wasn't even technically a one-on-one: there's no power asymmetry there.
I agree with your general take, but there are some details that I think are pretty far off-base, such as this about communication:
"Most people learn this by high school. I mean, if you're a functioning adult at a grown-up job, some decorum, emotional intelligence, and context come with the territory."
I've worked in a number of different fields including the military, computer sales/maintenance, and medicine. While there are plenty of people who had learned to communicate fairly well, there were also plenty of people who were nearly catastrophically bad at it. Spend a month in a surgery center to see how bad functioning adults at a grown-up job can get.
"What he was doing with his girlfriend wasn't even technically a one-on-one: there's no power asymmetry there."
There's a tremendous amount of power asymmetry in a lot of relationships, particularly if you land yourself a narcissist.
I'm very glad that I don't have to have such a formalized relationship with my boss. We can just shoot the shit around the coffee machine in the break room. Of course, it's been eight years, in a very small company.
I was actually discouraged from doing 1 on 1s but I'd love to do them with the shy folks that don't speak up and don't join for a quick bteak time chat outside.
especially with the lack of privacy in an open office I learn to late if they start feeling bad for any reason.
My hunch is that 1on1 is time when a manager tries to build a working mental model of his/her report: the manager tried to use empathy to read the employee.
The more you try to sell me on your GENIUS business practice, the less I believe that you know what effective management entails.