Why to Have One on Ones
One on One’s are a critical component of people management—both up and down. They’re the touchpoint with your reports and with your manager. They should be a central pillar for information transfer, coaching, utilization & capacity understanding, humanizing yourself and, critically, getting in front of things before it blows up and turns into turd pie.
In other words, One on One’s are the core mechanism for people management.
But how often should you have them? Thirty minutes, once a week, every week.
Some people need an hour every week – new managers, people new to the company, someone with a massive project—but most are good with thirty minutes. If you’re a manager and you’re not meeting with your people on a weekly basis, that is a problem. If you’re not meeting with your manager on a weekly basis, that is a problem.
So why are so many managers terrible at them—or eschew them completely? Why is it a fight to keep them on the calendar or to get people to show up on time? Why are people not prepared for this meeting? Why do they get pushed and bumped and squeezed in when someone has a free ten minutes?
Because they eat your calendar! With a team of ten, it is easy to spend a third of your week doing one on one’s! A THIRD!
There are probably as many solutions to the one on one calendar devouring as there are managers, but it ultimately comes down to this: you have to accept that managing people means ceding a good chunk of your calendar to one on one’s.
With the biggest possible passive aggressive air quotes, managers who try and “save time” by doing them irregularly, or doing them when someone “needs one” or pushing them to be quarterly or once a month or over beers at the bar are fooling themselves. Worse, they’re doing their report, themselves and their group a huge disservice.
How? Because they’re creating and perpetuating a culture that reacts and invites crisis.
And I’ll just get this out of the way and say I’m just as guilty as anyone else of pushing a 1o1 – sometimes you get busy or you have a deadline and you’ve got to finish something—but I also know with whom I can push a meeting, and with whom I cannot. And I only start occasionally pushing one on one’s when the report knows where the, raise it up the flagpole, line is—and they’re using that line correctly. I will also add that I am guilty of doing the one hour every other week solution—so when I say, it doesn’t work, I know of what I speak!
Let’s talk about manager load capacity. Organizations love to throw tons of direct reports onto a seemingly competent manager’s plate, wipe their hands of responsibility and then wonder why people fail to grow, stagnate and then leave. There is a great Rands in Repose article on manager capacity that I read years ago and that has stuck with me. In short, it goes like this:
A person can manage seven people, plus or minus three, depending on the manager skill level, team personnel makeup and level of activity.
Spend 30, per report, per week, in one on ones
Build in an additional 15-30 minutes, per report, per week, for dealing with the random stuff that comes up—it may not come up every week, but when it does, you’ve got the time budgeted
This jives with my own experience in very direct ways. I would add three more bullets:
Add and additional 5 minutes per report of a report – things will bubble up
One on One’s with people managers should be 60 minutes
Add in 30 additional random stuff minutes per 5 people, rounded up
One on one’s should be done where you can see the other person’s face – whether in person or via video call
Practically, what does this mean?
Doubling a team size more than doubles manager time commitments
This non-linear growth is consuming, and the natural inclination is to free up time by making one on one’s happen every other week. Maybe you try and compensate by making the 1o1’s into hour long meetings. Maybe you try to combine them with another meeting. Maybe you try and put two people into the same “one” on one. All of these solutions will be materially worse than just accepting that managing people requires spending dedicated, regular time focused on them. An hour every other week is rarely as good a touch point as 30 minutes every week. Until you are very well established and know your team and managers down to their toenails, fight the urge. It gets you short term gains at long term loss.
How? Your random stuff time will skyrocket.
You become reactive—to the crisis of the day or week, to utilization shifts, to an HR question, to unheralded client demands, to whatever. All the things that started off little, that you could calm or solve in 10 minutes, now start off on fire. Calming a client or intra-team or intra-department issue that has festered for a week now takes hours, not minutes. Even a simple issue or question from a single employee who has felt like they were ignored or back-burnered while you dealt with, quote, “important things”, unquote, can quickly escalate to being deeply problematic.
And because it is on fire, you push other stuff off your plate, like, say, other one on ones. So then those issues get pushed, those people get ignored, their issues go unresolved and you’ve started the clock on the issues you’re going to be dealing with next week or next month.
Things snowball.
Familiar hamster Wheel?
Self sabotaging is real
Because you were “saving time”. Because you’re less connected to the day to day of your team. Things snowball, and when you fall behind the momentum it is much harder to catch up.
The issues will vary, but there will be a measurable increase in overall issues. Some weeks it’ll be a client issue, another it will be two team members butting heads and a third it might be someone who is barely utilized and not raising their hand. You’re reacting to all of them –but it is the last one that should keep you up at night. You had someone on your team barely working for over a week and you didn’t know about it. This is why the weekly touchpoint reigns supreme—you can pulse your team better and more consistently.
Strategies
The best strategy I have found to combat calendar consumption is to set aside daily windows for one on ones, keep the same window every day and make sure your team knows those are your blocks. I tried doing one block at 10a and the other at 1p, but the one in the afternoon regularly suffered. If random stuff comes up, it will eat your afternoon and the afternoon one on one block. I would recommend 930a and 1030a every day. This way, you have at least 30 minutes in between if the first one runs long or you need to return a phone call or respond to an email, use the bathroom, whatever.
This can be complicated with reports in different time zones, people who get in late on a given day of the week or any number of other issues. That’s fine. Establishing a one on one block provides transparency and it means the rest of the team respects your closed door during that time period—or if they do interrupt, you know it is urgent.
The second strategy is acceptance. Accept that managing a team means you’re actually focusing on the team and putting your time towards that team. There is balance, for sure, but if you believe that one on ones are a drain on you, your time and what your “real” focus should be, that will come through. Who wants to have a conversation with someone who clearly disdains that they have to have that conversation?
Finally, be prepared for the 1o1. Good one on one’s also have agendas and topics. Having those set and written/typed out will help keep you at 30 minutes—rather than forgetting critical bits or coming up with the discussion items on the fly.
I’ve heard Leadership described as, Doing many small things, well. One on one’s are a small thing. Do them and do them well. We’ll get into the substance of a good 1o1 in another post, but, for now, start with having weekly one on ones and build from there.