
The unreasonable effectiveness of one-on-ones - signa11
https://www.benkuhn.net/11
======
jimbob45
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.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
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.

~~~
rimliu
Talking with your SO on the predefined schedule is just a tad less frightening
than not talking at all.

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goatherders
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.

~~~
scottLobster
"Feels" heard being the key word.

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).

~~~
eq_sd_
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.

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vorpalhex
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.

~~~
goatherders
I understand your point and disagree. In many orgs it isnt practical not a
good idea to be invested in a person beyond the work you do together.

~~~
sgt101
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.

~~~
quanticle

        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.

------
blablabla123
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

~~~
kjeetgill
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.

------
JackPoach
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.

------
dvt
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.

~~~
Cougher
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.

------
thrower123
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.

~~~
anotheryou
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.

------
vjktyu
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.

