
One-on-one meetings are underrated, whereas group meetings waste time - lkrubner
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/one-on-one-meetings-are-underrated-whereas-group-meetings-waste-time
======
ismail
A few points:

1\. The conflict in meetings is not a negative. It is actually a positive. At
the intersection of conflict between perspectives is where you get unique
insights, innovative ways of doing things.

2\. The problem is where conflict is seen as negative.

3\. A manager who is running the meeting should be able to integrate different
perspectives and find a better path forward. If you can only do this in a 1on1
this is a skill that needs to be honed. You are leaving quite a bit of insight
and innovation on the table.

I ran an innovation skunk works project for a CEO. Saw him do this multiple
times in meetings. In almost every single case where we had multiple opposing
views he was able to integrate and actually propmpt us to come up with
something better. I have been honing this skill ever since and it really is an
eye opener.

4\. Agree on the points on managers being lazy and inviting people that should
not be in the room. You need to make sure you get the right people in the
room. I would actually encourage conflict.

5\. Depending on what needs to be communicated but face to face works best

6\. This post seems to assume it is the managers responsibility to make
decisions? I would argue unless the manager has more context then his staff
decisions should be made by them with the manager providing context and making
sense of what needs to be done.

The way I see management in today’s environment is more akin to facilitation
rather than manage. If people are smart and self motivated management may
actually do more harm then good.

7\. When conflict is viewed as negative it can be counter productive as it
seems to be for the author. The question is how do you manage it so you
actually leverage it for better output? One way we do this is with our values

“We value diversity of ideas, thought”

8\. What we have seen work is categories of meetings, brain storming, problem
solving, deep dive learning session, quick updates (timeboxed) I suspect
author is not managing my the conversation correctly hence he has this issue.

~~~
ismail
9\. If an employee were to “blame” someone else in a one on one meeting and I
was the manager? I would look at myself. The manager has as much to blame. In
an environment where there is a whole lot of finger pointing this started
somewhere and my dibs are on it started from the top.

~~~
ismail
“If a person is running late on a project, the best way to find out the reason
is to have a one-on-one meeting with them. “

10\. Interesting that he mentioned ducker. Performance is as a function of the
system the people are working in. The assumption in this post is that
“somebody is to blame”. In most cases I would argue that it would actually be
a fuction of the underlying system. You as a manager are also part of it. You
are to blame as well, so is the processes team members, values etc.

------
jaggederest
This resonates with me. I much prefer conversations over group meetings, and I
would very much like to have more of those conversations instead of daily
meetings.

However, I've suggested this to managers before and received forceful feedback
that they "did not have time for that".

It was confusing - if you're a pure manager, what more valuable allocation of
your time could there be than in talking directly to people?

~~~
ath0
"What more valuable allocation of your time could there be than in talking
directly to people?"

Taking action, based on the what you've learned while talking directly to
people.

A manager's output is the the output of the teams under his or her supervision
or influence[1]. That means you have to find the highest-leverage activities:
sometimes that's a one-on-one conversation, up, down or sideways. Sometimes it
means sitting down and drafting an email or other written document that
compiles all the little details you've learned into something meaningful and
actionable for the people around you. Sometimes it's about being in front of a
group and enabling a conversation that you're not directly at the center of,
but which wouldn't happen well without you present.

Which isn't to say your manager at the time was right to dismiss your
concerns, or was doing the most high-leverage things they could do. But the
perspective might be useful.

[1] High Output Management, Andy Grove (former CEO of Intel). One of several
great management books that help clarify "what management is and is not". And
if you have never read anything in the genre, I'd start with Managing Humans,
by Michael Lopp (randsinrepose.com). Life-changing for me when I was trying to
figure out the same thing, before I started doing it myself.

~~~
nilkn
> Taking action, based on the what you've learned while talking directly to
> people.

If you don't talk to people, then you're oblivious to which actions you
actually need to take. You may then end up doing things that have neutral or
even negative value.

I'm very skeptical of any manager who never does 1-1s with their direct
reports. Such a person is probably more of a project manager than an actual
people manager.

(I'm not disagreeing with you, just adding more perspective.)

------
PeterFBell
I think it's more important to count clarify, brevity and value than number of
attendees. I have a fast growing team where 12 people reporting to three
different departments have to work closely together to align instruction,
coaching and curriculum. We have a 12 person daily standup. It runs 15 minutes
(20 tops) and as well as creating a social situation to engage enjoyably with
our peers (we're a remote first team so if we don't meet we don't interact) it
also allows us to learn of the various initiatives people are working on,
problem students they're dealing with, etc. Even though it's a 12 person
meeting, it's probably the most valuable 15 minutes of the day as our biggest
challenge is alignment, not production/creation.

I generally hate meetings, but as long as they have a clear agenda, the
shortest possible duration, the smallest number of required attendees to
achieve the clearly defined outcomes (and allow for optional attendees if
people are interested), I find they are a great way of moving forward
discussions that bogged down after trying to manage them via an email chain.

~~~
valuearb
We have a 10 person daily standup that takes 30 minutes. The difference is
leadership I think. Our meeting host struggles to cut off discussions that
should be taken outside of the standup.

~~~
praneshp
Yeah at a previous job we had a six person team regularly doing almost hour
long stand-ups (daily). First time I was thankful for job mobility in silicon
valley.

------
psyc
I suspect that half the function of meetings is not to get things done, but
soft things like being visible, signaling to others, and confirming and
evolving the implicit hierarchy.

~~~
volgo
That is literally what the author said in the article

~~~
psyc
Where in the article? I don’t see it anywhere.

~~~
volgo
His main point in the article:

" Why do such meetings happen? There are 2 main reasons:

1\. the manager is lazy and undisciplined and so invites everyone rather than
thinking hard about who they actually need to speak to

2\. the manager is an egotist who likes to force people to listen to the
manager’s words "

------
Yokohiii
Well it sounds nice but I feel there are some parts left in the dark. Working
this way seems to be over reliant on a single manager. The world is now smart
enough to know that we are continually misled by biases, focusing on a single
person will emphasize and neither that topic nor a strategy for correction has
been discussed by the author. I want my manager to be smart, but this is
expecting the manager to be very smart at various levels and leaves very
little room for mistakes.

One on one meetings are underrated, especially with tech people and even among
them. It is important that managers and tech people build acceptance and try
to align their mindsets and share knowledge. But one on ones also leave room
for manipulation and favoritism which can tear teams apart.

I agree that many group meetings are boring and badly executed, but a team
needs sit at the same table once in a while, even if it is just there to
detect conflicts and resolve them one on one. Group meetings suffer greatly
from groupthink and dominance of invidiuals. Which is usually badly
compensated, if at all. But the failure usually starts with a sloppy agenda
and inviting the wrong people. There has been quite some work on that but I
usually only see scrum masters randomly doing some of them without serious
reflection.

Managers should take care of decisions and tasks that teams or invidials
cannot make. Most importantly bring the right people together, get out of the
way and cash in the results later. Being the single point of failure is not
the solution.

~~~
hliyan
I too agree to a certain extent. I've experienced many problems that could
have been avoided had decisions been communicated to wider audiences, and
problems that were actually avoided because someone in a meeting (who was not
a primary participant) said "actually if you do that change, you'll need to
handle a dependency with our component".

~~~
Yokohiii
Exactly this, small but important details can disappear.

------
monster_group
Pardon my UI / CSS ignorance but these days I find that I have to zoom in
every single article on the web to read it comfortably. I had to zoom this
article at 200%. The default text is just too small and I am just using a
standard HD display. It would be even smaller on higher resolutions. Do people
not view their own website? Does everybody else also find themselves zooming
in most of the web pages. What am I missing?

~~~
munchor
It might be related to you having a 4K/Retina monitor and the website's author
having an older (i.e. regular) display.

The author might never have tested their website on a large display like ours
and thus it'll look a bit odd and we have to zoom in.

~~~
have_faith
Don't hi-res monitors have UI scaling built in to the OS? so sizes should be
roughly comparable

~~~
digi_owl
Sometimes it feels like everything is still done by pixel counting on bitmaps.

------
CalChris
The only meeting style I ever actually liked was the daily (!) 10 o'clock in
the morning 5 minute meeting. It had two (unstated) goals:

    
    
      got everyone in by 10AM
      made sure everyone saw each once a day
    

This isn't something you can do, month in month out, forever. But it works for
projects under pressure. Otherwise I largely agree with the FA. Meetings suck
up everyone's time and puts them in a room with a depleting oxygen supply.

The worst meetings are exercises and displays of power. Perhaps these are
necessary but never at the project level. Some middling managers need to
remind themselves they are in charge of something. Seriously, if as a manager
you can't write down what your group accomplished over that hour then you just
wasted an hour of your group's time.

I worked for a company once where my boss had one of those sorts of meetings.
One time, knowing that I was in for an hour of yammering, I told him right
before the meeting I had to take care of something. I went out, hopped in my
car, drove to a gym, played an hour of pickup basketball, drove back and when
I saw my boss I told him I'd taken care of that thing. I also got a lot done
that day.

------
valuearb
I’m a big fan of 1-1 meetings. I like a lot of what he says, especially about
the near futility of bigger meetings.

But my manager was just instructed to schedule biweekly 1-1 meetings with all
17 of his direct reports. I think it’s the dumbest thing ever. If i have
something to say to him, i can usually schedule time that day. I may need to
bother him 3 times a week, or not for three weeks. When he wants to talk to
me, he drops by my desk and we meet right then.

When my regularly scheduled 1-1 time arrives, i’m busy, don’t bother me.

1-1s good. Forcible 1-1s bad.

~~~
nilkn
I actually don't agree. I'm a manager who does regularly scheduled 1-1s with
direct reports and I couldn't tell you how many times something unexpectedly
comes up that wouldn't have been talked about otherwise. It's also very
important just to establish basic rapport between manager and direct report.
1-1s aren't always about conducting business.

You have to keep in mind your manager is also meeting with _sixteen_ other
people, so he's seeing a much higher-level picture of the value of these 1-1s
than you are.

~~~
valuearb
I have great rapport with my manager. And he agrees with me on 1-1s, he was
super approachable before the 1-1 edict was handed down to him, and he went
out of his way to touch base with you regularly. His life right now is wall to
wall meetings all week long.

You may think your fixed 1-1s are effective for you, but that doesn’t mean
your reports all agree.

~~~
ramchip
Is it possible having _seventeen_ direct reports might be at least partially
the problem?

~~~
valuearb
Yep

------
jroseattle
This entirely depends on the discussion.

As a manager, I use 1:1 to discuss matters related to or pertinent to the
individual. I use group discussions to discuss group-level matters -- this is
usually something related to project work, i.e. scope, design decisions, etc.

I don't compare the two because they are both "meetings". Each serve a
purpose, and ideally both are executed well.

~~~
valuearb
Do you always distribute an agenda before your group meetings? If not, they
aren’t executed well.

~~~
jroseattle
Yes and no.

Yes -- the subject matter of the meeting is well-defined beforehand and
distributed to all.

No -- our topics ARE the agenda and it's normally highly focused. We have on
occasion had a second bullet point, but it's rare.

We do lots of other things to keep discussions brief and ensure our time is
spent effectively, but you didn't ask about those.

~~~
valuearb
What do you do with decisions made from the Meeting?

~~~
apple4ever
You execute them and follow up.

------
yeukhon
One problem with group meeting is going on tangent. There should be a clear
agenda established prior to the meeting.

Having so much frustration with unproductive meetings, I have been thinking
about these, and they work in my case.

1\. Attach agenda prior to meetig, along with a link to a Google Doc (or
whatever live tool you use)

2\. Reiterate agenda at the beginning of the meeting, and if this was a
continuation of the previous meeting, go over the outcome of the last meeting.
They should be reflect in your agenda.

3\. Invite someone to be a moderator. Creator/caller of the meeting may be the
moderator — only if the moderator thinks he/she is capable of keeping the
meeting on track.

4\. Ask attendees to use the doc to add questions/summary/views/new items.

5\. Summarize before going to the next part of the agenda and at the end of
the meeting. “To do, to be discussed” should be announced. Don’t end meeting
by just saying “okay thanks for coming, let’s get to work.” Make sure people
know what the outcomes are.

I learned #4 when I interned at Mozilla a long time ago. Not sure if everyone
team does, but etherpad was very widely used afair. It was helpful for
everyone in the team running the meeting in real time and after the meeting,
especially because every user gets a different color assigned when the user
enters the pad, so we could trace who wrote/made the changd.

~~~
tybit
Yeah, even simple meeting guidelines/policies help make them a lot more
productive in my limited experience.

Having meetings have explicit action points agreed on at the end (and who's
responsible for them) and written down helped us immensely.

We were able to almost completely avoid the constant 'have a meeting, agree on
x, fast forward 2 weeks and no one can agree if we agreed on x nor why we did'
that I've experienced at every other job.

------
comstock
The first thing I want to say when I go into a group meeting is “how did we
fail”.

If people are communicating well, slack, grabbing coffee, email then group
meeting seem unimportant. When you need to setup a meeting, in particular to
discuss a specific issue, it feels like something has gone wrong that we’re
all not well aligned already.

~~~
Bahamut
I don’t agree with this as a generalization - there are a lot of times where
one needs to come to a consensus between various stakeholders, and group
meetings are the best way to lay out the pros/cons, and come to a decision.

At bigger companies, group meetings take on a larger significance due to the
business knowledge base being so massive that group meetings with lots of
presentations become the best way to facilitate knowledge awareness.

~~~
comstock
Personally, I think if you’ve reached a point where consensus hasn’t formed
naturally in some other venue then it is kind of a failure.

Trying to hash thing out in a meeting is ok as a last resort, but it seems
less than ideal. Particularly when people often need time to form coherent
ideas.

Group meeting with lots of presentations? Just sounds like my idea of hell
really. I’d much prefer to read some notes on a subject and then later sit
down with someone if I need to go into more detail.

~~~
henrygrew
but what if you don't get time to read the notes and no one is available for a
sit down?

~~~
valuearb
Then the info really wasn’t that important to your day to day job, was it?

------
jknoepfler
The sight of a bunch of passive engineers shuffling off to a meeting they
aren't needed at still makes me seethe. You have a professional obligation to
say "no" sometimes.

Engineer and executive hours are not cheap. Every unnecessary person in a
conference room is a gigantic waste of resources. Beyond three or four people,
the marginal utility of adding another person to a meeting is almost certainly
steeply negative. Exceptions are situations that require consensus, or where
someone is observing to learn.

The last team I worked on had regular 10+ person meetings that entire teams
would shuffle off to. I started refusing to go to meetings with more than four
other people in them (unless there was a very specific reason to be there). I
felt it reduced distractions and waste.

What bothers me even more than the meetings though are engineers who attend
them repeatedly, then grumble quietly about how useless they are afterwards.
Articulate a thoughtful "no." Get good at it, because you'll need to do it
often if you want to be a good engineer.

~~~
thisisit
I completely agree. People tend to be afraid of saying "no" to avoid offending
people. And then there is the case of showing off in front of 10+ people.

At my last job, people were spending nearly 2 hours each day in meetings. Each
of these meetings required 1-2 hours of preparation. So, nearly 50% of the
work week or 20 out of 40 hours were being lost. And most of these meetings
were "updates" meetings. Update to Lead Engineer, then team, then VP etc. To
top it off the manager believed in "face to face" interactions. So, all
meetings happened via video conferencing.

Whenever I explained on how it should be a lead engineer updating the manager
and the manager updating to VP, I was given a strange look. How do we show off
our achievements? They said.

But it also meant I couldn't individually say "no". Every time I did that my
manager received flurry of mails from other engineers on why I was given the
"special" treatment of skipping these meetings.

~~~
jknoepfler
It's a shame it's so ingrained in the culture there. I completely respect that
in many situations one isn't permitted to refuse. The idea of showing off at
meetings, as opposed to by shipping quality on time and documenting it is
crazy.

------
scarface74
I worked with a project manager who _loved_ large long status meetings and
requirements meetings. It was getting to the point nothing was getting done.
Most of the people in the meeting were contractors. 8 people at $100 bill rate
was $800 each meeting. I had to put a stop to it. I started a virtual status
meeting. I opened a slack channel at 10:00 and everyone posted their updates.
If the PM wanted to know anything else they would have to go to the individual
dev.

Anyone was free to leave the slack channel after they posted their update.

I told them unless the meeting request was coming from me or someone higher up
in my management change, that all meeting requests were just that "requests"
that they were free to decline if necessary.

------
dennisgorelik
One-on-one meetings have minimum possible number of people required for
information exchange (2 participants).

1) Discussions are very valuable for team coordination, so having meetings is
very important for efficient teamworks.

2) In order to contribute, every person, participating in the meeting, must
understand the discussion.

3) The more people are in the meeting - the more dumbed down the discussion
must be in order to allow everyone to follow the discussion. That makes
meetings with larger number of people - less efficient. Which makes meetings
with 2 people (one-on-one) - the most efficient.

------
nilkn
This feels like an especially relevant conversation to have during the
holidays, when many folks will be out of the office, so the number of meetings
happening will be way down.

I've consistently observed over the past few years that whenever a bunch of
frequent-meeting-schedulers are simultaneously out of the office... everything
is fine. Nothing bad happens. Team members coordinate with each other fine.
Cross-team coordination happens fine. There are still meetings, but the ones
that happen tend to be the ones that are actually important and needed. The
fluff meetings that have way too many participants get cancelled because too
many folks are out, and it becomes more obvious than ever that those meetings
were never valuable in the first place.

My productivity (as half-manager-half-programmer) goes way up. My stress and
frustration go down because I'm not giving the same status report to the same
set of people three times.

I'm not against meetings in general, whether they be 1-1s or large group
meetings. I think meetings are fundamental to many organizations. But I do
think that almost every workplace has too many meetings that last too long on
average and have too many participants on average.

"Meeting culture" tends to act like a virus that infects various parts of the
organization. Pure managers get addicted to scheduling and running meetings,
because it's the most concrete way they can exercise their authority and
appear productive, even if it's not actually productive or helpful to the
organization.

------
juanmirocks
I’ve barely been in a group meeting that felt productive. The problem is: no
body has the responsibility.

Even with friends, one-to-one or maximum 3 friends together is the most
efficient way to know the people.

~~~
valuearb
Tell your team no group meetings without an agenda distributed before meeting,
and organizer has to distribute action items and who is responsible for them
afterwards. You’ll find your meetings are lots more productive if you do.

------
lucidguppy
Darwinism and Neuroscience needs to get further into society.

I'm sure when we evolved - we weren't designed to ever have productive
meetings with groups larger than four or five.

That's why associations follow the Robert's rules of order.

By recognizing human limitations we can come up with appropriate workarounds.

------
apple4ever
I've worked for a manager who insisted on weekly one-on-one meetings, and it
was terrible. I wasted so much time in those meetings, that could have been
better served in group meetings, a specific one-time meeting, or email. We all
hated it because of that.

The best thing to do is have weekly group meetings, setup meetings as needed
otherwise, and have 3 or 6 month one-on-one meeting just to check in.

This article is so wrong. It sounds like he had bad employees, and instead of
firing them, did a terrible job and micromanaged them instead.

~~~
jimothywales
How long did your weekly one-on-one meetings take? Were there other negative
aspects to the one-on-ones besides the time sink?

------
Roritharr
I'm on the fence about this. In our org, we have all kinds of meetings. From
the perfect highly efficient and successful meetings, to ones where either the
results were hard to disseminate and transport because certain viewpoints were
missing or ones where half of the participants were there needlessly.

It's a tough task to keep the quality level of meetings high, regardless of
scenario. I've been in too many one on ones where we just enjoyed each others
company a bit too much and it veered off from relevant stuff to just chat and
the goals of the one-on-one besides establishing rapport were not achieved.

It's also trying in a interdisciplinary scrum team. We "sacrifice" a full day
of our 6-8 person teams every two weeks and it's a mixed bag if review, retro
and planning will be efficient and successful or boring and feeling wasteful.
Sometimes planning has lots of time spent where backend devs discuss
difficulties that are irrelevant to Frontend, sometimes sometimes a Frontend
Dev offers a more elegant solution and vice versa.

Personally I've accepted that it's something where one always has to walk the
line. There's no easy fix or guideline that always works and it's best to
become comfortable with that and try to do best without following a dogma.

~~~
valuearb
Some of those things are important, but shouldn’t take a day. Any guess is the
meeting organizers aren’t preparing well enough, and aren’t keeping the
meeting on track.

Pointing stories should never take more than an hour for example. There is
little benefit to tedious discussion because engineering estimates aren’t that
accurate anyways. You need to weight, not measure, so business can understand
relative costs.

The whole point of Agile is to deliver high velocity to the customers highest
priorities, with frequent releases and course adjustments. If you spend 10% of
your teams velocity on standing ceremonies, there should be a really
compelling reason.

------
clarkevans
There is much wisdom in this essay.

Complementary to 1-1s are short, daily stand-ups that: (a) dispatch with
unforeseen challenging items that involve multiple players and necessary
coordination, (b) identification of redundant work or cross-team delegation
where a more knowledgeable team member offers to do something that they would
be more efficient at, (c) public prise and building a sense of momentum and
respect among team members.

Instead of big meetings, especially with other groups, asking for a working
document is sometimes the best way to collaborate with cross-functional teams.
Concrete artifacts focus attention. It can be asynchronous. If the materials
are reviewed by managers before the meeting, you can avoid pontification and
poor use of your staff's time. Recorded presentations of these documents can
also be productive for broader audience, provided the materials are reviewed
before they are presented. Even within one's team, written communication is
essential to building shared knowledge. Calling for trouble shooting or
brainstorming meetings can work well if the meetings are promptly rescheduled
if team members have failed to read the prerequisite materials.

------
SuperNinKenDo
The site/podcast 'Manager Tools' has an interesting series on the importance
of one-on-ones which is definitely worth checking out if the article piqued
anyone's interest in this tool. Don't let the date scare you, scroll down to
the bottom to find them they're some of the earliest on the feed.

[https://www.manager-tools.com/all-
podcasts?field_content_dom...](https://www.manager-tools.com/all-
podcasts?field_content_domain_tid=4)

Some of the big takeaways are:

1\. Normalise one-on-ones so people understand that a one-on-one is a meeting
to build the relationship and actually sort things out, not the precursor to a
punishment or other serious issue.

2\. Make an agenda, communicate it and then actually stick to it.

3\. That agenda should be based one what do you want to talk about, what do
they want to talk about, and then discussion of the future. They leave it
intentionally open ended and yet fairly strictly time bounded.

4\. One-on-ones are regular and important. Do not prioritise things over them
unless absolutely necessary as they're the way to build lasting relationships
of trust and accord with individuals and teams.

They have some points of minor disagreement with the author of this piece. For
instance their one-on-one's are egalitarian, and a fixed time every time, with
no prioritisation of particular personal for extra meetings of these kinds
(though I assume they're open to one-on-one conversations as necessary).

The podcasts go into a lot of exposition and example scenarios, common pit
falls and the like. I actually really enjoy them for the people skills, not
being a manager myself. Like I said, they have points of agreement and
disagreement with the author over the precise purpose and format of the one-
on-one, but I think this piece was good and complementary to the advice I've
absorbed from them.

~~~
valuearb
Scheduled 1-1s are dumb and a huge waste of time. If i need to talk to my
manager, i want to do it now, not 3 pm on thursday. If i have nothing to talk
about on thursday at 3 pm, why do I have to break my flow to go to your
office.

A better way is closer to “management by walking around”. Be available for
your employees. Those rare birds who need regular 1-1s, schedule them. For
everyone else make sure they know they can have one anytime they need, and
make sure you take them aside on a regular basis if they haven’t asked for
one. And just walk the floor and talk to your team, almost every day.

A manager should be aware of when they haven’t connected directly with a team
member in while, and just do it. It’s not hard to track.

------
late2part
Efficiency versus effectiveness. Good words in this essay, but it sort of
throws the baby out with the bathwater.

Do what works and makes sense. Catering to everyone's whim is not always in
the best interest of the company. Adjust to your employees' preferences, but
from time to time they should adjust to the company too.

------
scarface74
From the article.

 _A final word about one-on-one meetings. Food is important. Getting away from
the office is important._

Nope not going to do it. I hate to have the "Mike Pence Rule" but my reasoning
is more practical. Why take the risk of something being said? I don't go to
lunch one on one with anyone who reports to me.

------
walshemj
If you have a meeting with 15 people and its dominated by 3 people your
chairing skills suck

~~~
valuearb
Or more likely your meeting organization skills suck. What did the agenda say?
What was the specific task the meeting was solving? Did it need 15 attendees,
or 3? What did the invitees say when you distributed the agenda?

~~~
walshemj
you chair the meeting with the attendees you have not those you would want

~~~
valuearb
You get out of a meeting what you put into it. If you don't prepare an agenda,
if you don't take accurate notes, and if you don't followup by distributing
the decisions made and responsible parties for implementing them to everyone,
you ain't going to get as much out of them.

And you are communicating to your attendees that your time is more valuable
than theirs, so maybe that's why you don't get the attendees you want.

------
tammer
One-on-one meetings are the single most under-rated (because they are the
single most useful) tool for any modern professional.

There is a clear technique on how to make these meetings successful that I
don’t see being discussed or shared.

------
byron_fast
How you react to this discussion is the difference between business-minded
people and everyone else.

------
sulam
This guy sounds like a horrible manager. The screed about too many people in
the wrong meetings is good, but there are large meetings that have a reason to
be. Also, the emphasis on email over meetings is misplaced — it’s not either
or, of course you do both. The worst part is the tone described in his one on
ones, which apparently are blame games and witch hunts. It’s spectacularly
unproductive to encourage team members to throw each under the bus as a normal
rule.

One on ones are hugely valuable, but in my experience managers who emphasize
those over team meetings are usually practitioners of differential
communication — telling everyone a message customized to make them happy —
otherwise known as spin. This is usually associated with new managers who
practice a weak form of management, focused on being liked over results. That
isn’t this guy’s problem, though!

One on ones should be focused on specific discussions the employee is thinking
about. Topics include career development, performance management, company
issues, and most importantly concerns they have that need to be addressed
before they become truly serious. In that way they serve as an early warning
system for issues that are affecting the team.

Think about it, the one on one is probably the only time you are guaranteed to
have a direct, personal interaction with your manager that is likely to be
more than a brief interaction. It’s definitely the only time you’re not
meeting to talk about specific projects. Anything other than mostly listening
by a manager during this time is a bad plan.

~~~
purerandomness
I wholeheartedly agree. I never would like to work with or for this guy.

> If a person is running late on a project, the best way to find out the
> reason is to have a one-on-one meeting with them. They are free to
> incriminate themselves, in ways that I find useful. For instance, they might
> put all the blame on someone else. After the meeting I will investigate
> their accusations and discover the truth. Is the other person to blame? If I
> conclude that the other person is not to blame, then I know I have a person
> on my team who both runs late and dishonestly blames other people for their
> problems.

This reads like micromanagement, wasting so much effort into finding someone
to blame, and creating an atmosphere of fear and self-doubt.

What he should do instead with all this wasted energy:

Encourage people to discover self-management techniques. Create an atmosphere
of trust and reliability by positive, affectionate reinforcement. Give them
freedom to breathe, give them reasons to ask themselves every morning "What is
one thing that I can improve in my workflow today?" _intrinsically_?

Intrinsic motivation is key. If you build pressure, they'll never develop
their potential, because they never knew that it's possible.

Lead by example, becasue nothing motivates stronger than thinking "Wow, I want
to be as cool and productive as my manager, he's awesome!".

This guy does everything wrong. He's wasting time and money, and people will
leave until he learns.

~~~
internetman55
Yeah, none of the managers I've met with that sort of negative attitude have
been successful. I hope that he straightens himself out and gets it together
soon, especially if he has a family that relies upon him for income. He seems
to have some good thoughts in other parts of the essay though.

------
ravitation
This is micromanagement 101. (Sorry this turned into a bit of a wall of text.)

If you find one-on-one meetings more productive than group meetings, then you
are terrible at running group meetings. Full stop, I don't even need to know
how good this guy is at running meetings.

Let's walk through some of the benefits the author lists first...

1) Participates can speak without boring others. This is an indicator of two
possibilities. One, you have the wrong people at this meeting - that's your
fault as a manager (and probably as the meeting leader/facilitator). Or two,
you are running the wrong kind of meeting - again, that's your fault as a
manager. Meetings should be purposeful, and every participant should have a
purpose in being there. You as a manager (and hopefully your team) should
consider this before every meeting (trust me, it's easier to do that than hold
several times more meetings).

2) People can speak without being interrupted. If you're letting people
interrupt each other, you're bad at leading meetings. If you're leading a
meeting, you're there to serve the purpose of the meeting, not to be
everyone's friend. Again, that's your fault as a manager.

3) They can offer negative opinions about their coworkers. Whoa. Now we're in
_really_ bad management territory. How are you going to go about conflict
resolution once this person has confided in you? How are you going to be a
neutral party? Not only that but giving you that negative opinion didn't solve
anything.

4) They can offer positive opinions about their coworkers. Haha. What. "The
too obvious incentive of their co-worker hearing their praise." Jesus. Where
do you work? This isn't even bad management, this just sounds like a horribly
unhealthy organization.

5) "If a person is running late on a project, the best way to find out the
reason is to have a one-on-one meeting with them." I mean did you have to have
a one-on-one meeting to find this out? If you have people that are unwilling
to take responsibility for _their_ (yes, their, not _your_ ) projects, then
you need to check your hiring practices.

"They are free to incriminate themselves, in ways that I find useful." Jesus
Christ. Again, where the hell do you work? In ways that you find useful? "For
instance, they might put all the blame on someone else. After the meeting I
will investigate their accusations and discover the truth." Or, if you had
done this in a group setting, they wouldn't have had that option and you
wouldn't have to had to go play Sherlock Holmes with your employees. But, I
guess you have the free time? "If I’d called a group meeting, and that other
person was in the room, it’s unlikely that anyone would have told me the
truth." Or you could hire people that take responsibility for their actions.

6) "What if someone finishes a project much faster than I expected, or with
much higher quality than I was expecting?" "It would be awkward to try to have
these conversations while other people are in the room." I mean, maybe. They
might have questions too, or be interested in the answers. Again, if you take
the time to actually think about the purpose of the meeting you want to have
you won't run into this problem. There is a time and a place for one-on-one
meetings.

Now, let's look at some of the things he dislikes about group meetings now...

"As it was, during the typical meeting we had 15 people in the room, most of
whom were bored." Whoa. What. 15 people!? That's twice as many people as you
should probably ever have in a meeting.

"So who is right, and who is wrong?" Didn't see a whole lot of managing in
that conversation. Do your meetings even have leads/facilitators? Who is
holding the participates accountable for the purpose of the meeting?

"You’ll need to figure this out, but you don’t need to do so while 12 other
people are in the room. If you are the manager who is overseeing this, it is
up to you to get people back to work." Then do that, get the meeting back on
track.

"A great manager doesn’t allow such debates to exist, because they don’t hold
the kinds of meetings where this behavior is possible." WHOA. Nope. This is
about as bad as management can get. Debates are healthy, conflict isn't bad.
How else are you (and your organization) going to learn and grow?

There's a lot in there about "client" meetings, but not so much about internal
meetings. Why is that? Sounds like the author is shifting the blame... I like
to have managers that take responsibility for their actions...

So, what's the real conclusion of this article? Aside from there clearly being
some "client" issues. One-on-one meetings are easy. Here's why:

1) They are easy to lead. Leading one is easier than leading five.

2) They avoid, more or less, all conflict. Even the productive kind. You can
be everyone's friend.

3) They mean you (as a manager) don't have to think about who should attend.

4) Everything on your team has to go through you (I believe this is also
called micromanagement).

They also are far less efficient and effective, if you know how to lead a
group meeting.

------
imjustsaying
>one-on-one meetings

good luck defending against the sexual harassment allegations after that one.
i'll stick to group meetings where i won't be risking my career and
reputation.

