For me, one-on-ones are a super mixed bag. Personally, I get very little out of them. If I have feedback for my manager or vice-versa, I see zero reason to wait until a scheduled meeting to bring that up.
That said, I’ve managed people that absolutely needed regularly-scheduled one-on-ones, because they needed the dedicated time and space to bring things up that they otherwise wouldn’t in the normal course of business.
It really depends on the employee in question. I don’t think a one-size-fits-all approach works here.
I dread 1:1s with my manager. I simply do not have that much to say that I do not already say in group meetings or other channels. I find myself racking my brain to come up with agenda items to fill the time and save face.
Sometimes private conversations are necessary, but as a once in a while sort of thing, not on a biweekly cadence.
I can definitely relate to that but I also appreciate having a set time on the calendar where I know my manager is available. Where I work a manager’s calendar is always full, literally meetings back to back from 8a to 5p.
I’ve always scheduled 1 on 1’s with my team and I know it’s appreciated by some and I suspect dreaded by others. Are you not comfortable messaging your manager in advance to say you don’t have anything?
I’m being selfish here… how do I make people comfortable saying they don’t need to meet?
We have weekly 1:1 and I just say that I have nothing to say oftenly. Depends on you manager, but there is nothing wrong with that. A week is not a long period of time.
This is a perspective I have honestly never heard before.
Would you care to elaborate? I‘d really love to understand your POV better. Maybe I have a blind spot somewhere.
Background: I’ve always done them weekly (as biweekly seems to be worse than monthly — which in turn is arguably much worse than weekly). And they seemed to work quite well.. Basically 10-30min of chit-chat and catchup for relationship building.
I’m intensely introverted, so that likely colors my perspective.
I am curious what “relationship building” looks like to you in a business context.
I somewhat enjoyed 1:1s with a previous manager of mine. I did feel we built a good relationship, even if we didn’t have important business to discuss all the time. Eventually the manager left the company and now I’m left wondering what the point of all of it was… It was never a real relationship, it was a business transaction all along.
And if it’s a business transaction, then I just don’t care. I’d rather spend the time doing something that advances myself or the business. I just don’t get much value from meeting with my manager. The 30 minutes spent doesn’t feel like it has good ROI.
Not at all. I feel exactly the same way. I'm also introverted, and to me "relationship building" in a corporate context often feels really contrived.
I want to bring as much value as possible to my employer, and I don't feel like I generate value by having 1:1s for the sake of having 1:1s. I jump through the hoop though, because I want a promotion and I'm concerned that I won't get one if I don't fit the norm.
1:1 should be the moment for you to discuss with your boss what you should be doing to maximize the value you bring to the company.. those things often are not as black and white as they seen..
it is also the moment you share your career goals with your manager and for you two to discuss the goals you should achieve to be eligible for a promotion..
unfortunately more often then not promotions are the carrot that companies dangle in front of us to make us work harder with no intention on ever giving us the reward at the end..
exactly.. for remote workers this is even more important..
As a remote worker myself in the past i would often go weeks without nothing but my immediate family to socialize with..
It would even be a point of a little stress between me and my wife.. she is a teacher so her days a filled with social interactions, on weekends she would often want to stay home to recharge while i would want to go out an see other people..
now i have added a few activities that i do outside work during the week to allow some social interactions and it has done wonders not only for my mental health but has somewhat balanced the social batteries between me and the wife..
I am going to chime in here, but my situation is very particular and will not apply to every people, because i am an position were my current manager was my peer for a long time before he was promoted..
When we were peers we were the only two person from our team in our country, so we had a friendly relation as peers that we some how managed to keep when he became my manager..
We never had 1:1s before because we always speak to each other as we need.. We could go whole months with not talking much to each other, often only an occasional checking from him to jokingly ask if i was still alive, on the other hands there were times we would speak several times every day if there was need for it.. We both work fully remote since before he became a manager..
This year our company SVPs are mandating 1:1 for the whole team, so we are doing it every two weeks but our meeting are mostly chit chats with some work stuff here or there when there is something to discuss..
But as someone said above.. if i need something work related from him i will likely reach out and talk to him at the time.. We also have a whole team meeting once a month and most important stuff is discussed in that meeting, we also have a lot of non work chit chat in those, but there is not much left to discuss at 1:1s..
Also the stuff that i would discuss at 1:1 are not usually stuff i need to discuss every two weeks, it is career or pay stuff that i usually need to discuss two or three times per year.
I kind of agree with Jensen Huang on his take, most stuff can be discussed with the whole team, even coaching, the only thing you should only discuss in particular with your manager from you are your personal career and from him is any criticism he has to make (i believe in the saying, praise in public and criticize in private), but you should not need a regular 1:1 for those, you or your manager should schedule a meeting and discuss those when the need arise..
Now.. like i said, i work remote full time, so for me those 1:1, and even the team meetings, are some nice opportunity we have for some social interactions, this is why both are mostly chit chat.. so they are good for the team mental health so in some way they are good for our personal advancement as well.. so even if my manager is gone tomorrow i don't see as it being all for nothing..
Also having a close relation with one manager can be good for ones career, my manager know my career goals and he has being doing what he can to help me achieve my objectives.. if he is gone tomorrow the work he has already done to help will still have value..
Think this, we all had several friends trough life that we eventually lost contact with or very rarely speak with.. those friendships were important and had value at the time in some way or another but then they ended, just because they ended the value did not disappeared, it was valuable at the time and in some ways we carry this value with us, i see 1:1s with my manager the same way.. they are nice to have and have some value at the time but if he is gone tomorrow so be it..
Unlike the other comment, I am a bit more of the extrovert kind but most 1-on-1 are just a waste of time, we usually ended up repeating same things than previous meetings or chitchatting which we also do on coffee breaks or lunch time.
I am in the same boat and often discuss work that shouldn't be done in a one-on-one meeting. Minimal babysitting is needed in an organization of mature people. Sometimes, sensitive topics need to be discussed, and an ad-hoc one-on-one could be arranged, but anything else is wasteful.
> I dread 1:1s with my manager. I simply do not have that much to say that I do not already say in group meetings or other channels. I find myself racking my brain to come up with agenda items to fill the time and save face.
.... why? My 1-on-1's very rarely go beyond 10 minutes or so specifically because there usually isn't much to discuss, and even then we mostly just jump over some answers to simple questions, then end up bullshitting about whatever else is going on with life at the moment.
Depends on your relationship with your manager. I get a coffee with mine at least once a day if we're in the office together, usually lunch too, and also sit next to him, so if we did 1:1s they'd just be redundant.
Grabbing coffee is of course an informal 1:1 anyway, but you don't need to formalise it unless your manager struggles to make time for you.
> You absolutely need a space to talk candidly with your manager.
It's not so easy when you feel like you can't trust the people to whom you report. I'm in this situation after attempting to be candid about what I felt were missteps on the part of my manager and a director of engineering. After a scolding from one of them, and a veiled threat about my employment ending, I now feel like I just shouldn't rock the boat. I mostly dread my 1:1s with them, and I don't feel like those meetings are time well spent.
I could maybe understand if I had offered unsolicited feedback, but they asked for my opinion and I gave it honestly.
honestly.. if i were in your situation i would bet looking for another job..
Right now i have a really good relation with my manager to the point were i can him out to him if i need to and were i trust him to help me advance my career if he can and that he will not screw me over..
In the past i have being in a position were i was at odds with my manager and definitely could not trust him, as soon as i realized that i started looking for my way out.. The period between that manager being hired and i leaving that job was the most stressful period in my life.. never been so happy to be fired in my life..
Now, that was another life, i was young and single.. now i have a few mouths to feed so if i got in that same situation today i would not get myself fired like i did back then, but i for sure would look for another job..
>> if the CEO’s direct staff is 60 people, the number of layers you’ve removed in a company is probably something like seven.”
This is a great insight since so much gets lost in the management layer which causes frustration for devs while the CEO doesn't have a clue what's actually going on in the trenches.
But doesn't also much get lost when the manager can't keep up with 60 reports?
Mathematics teaches us that the distance in a tree, from root to leaf, where each node is a linked list, is minimized when the branching factor is e, the base of the natural logarithm. For example, e is the most efficient base for writing integers.
Management isn't quite the same, but branch size is are relevant.
Have you got a source for e as the optimal branching factor? (On average it feels plausible, but haven't seen a confirmation) But I don't get the idea about writing numbers in base e - by definition integers in base e are the least efficient, because they'd be infinite.
A non-integral number like e is obviously of limited utility in physical systems because having e adders in your ALU doesn't make much sense.
3 is closer then 2 to e, which also why ternary arithmetic was attempted for a while, but the massive advantage of binary in terms of implementation (it is much easier and far lower power to use transistors to slam a voltage high or low than keep it somewhere in the middle, and easier to arrange gates to have only on and off as inputs) won in the end.
Sounds nice until you put yourself in the employees shoes. All your mistakes become public case studies, you’re cut off from proper mentoring, and you can no longer say anything in private to your boss without the whole team hearing it
bear in mind he is a CEO.. His subordinates are most likely SVPs, so his relation with his subordinates is not the same as employees down at the bottom of the hierarchy with their managers..
so i hardly thing he is discussing personal mistakes in those meetings, he is more likely discussing policies that affect entire departments or even the whole company..
Other then that i believe that any person in any position and at any level, should praise in public and criticize in private, always..
But note that he never said he does not have private meetings with his subordinates when needed, he only said he does not think he should have a scheduled time every week to have this kind of discussions..
and honestly i agree with him.. 90% of what i discuss with my manager in our 1:1s could be discussed in front of the whole team.. the other 10% is not something i need to discuss ever other week it is usually stuff about my personal career that i need to discuss just a few times per year.. so for those when the need arise i just reach out to my manager and discuss with him..
also a managers is not always the best person to be coaching someone.. where i work we have managers and we have mentors and those are separated roles that may be taken by different people..
In the recently released book Rassie: Stories of Life and Rugby by Rassie Erasmus (two time World Cup winning South African rugby coach), Rassie mentions that he doesn’t do one-on-ones. To quote from the book:
"Everything was done in front of everybody. I’ve never had a one-on-one with a player, except when he came to me with a deeply personal issue. I told them not to come to me individually with questions about why they were not in the team, or why they thought they deserved an opportunity…
Some of the newer players weren’t used to me not having one-on-one discussions. I told them I preferred to talk to everyone together so everyone understood what was going on, and no rumours started about what might have happened between me and a player behind closed doors."
Given how often sports team analogies are used in leadership speak, perhaps this fits.
It's probably a good way to do management, because sometimes we'd good people with us and do 1-on-1s is only to take a conversation and that you can take another way! I'd led a coworker which multiple times we reschedule our 1-on-1s because we already keep feedbacks when things happen or after discuss about tasks, so this works for us and we optimize our time.
“I don’t do 1-on-1s, and almost everything I say, I say to everybody all the time. I don’t really believe there’s any information that I operate on that only one or two people should hear about… I believe that when you give everybody equal access to information, that empowers people. And so that’s number one… Number two, if the CEO’s direct staff is 60 people, the number of layers you’ve removed in a company is probably something like seven.”
I think this statement is really missing the point of 1-on-1's. They should be time set aside for the employee to talk about whatever is on their mind. It is ideally an opportunity for them to bring up any issues or concerns they might be having but is either unsuitable to or they are uncomfortable bringing it up with the larger group. Often the response is indeed, "Thanks for letting me know, I'll communicate that to the team." but it would have never been brought up if that time wasn't set aside to chat.
Sure, when you are directly reporting into the CEO you are probably in a position where you are expected to lead it out yourself unless it affects the entire company strategy, so it is less useful, but if you are working with ICs then they are still very useful.
The link seems to address that concern. It reads to me as if the view is that if the concern can't be shared with the group then it needn't be shared at all. Discussing it in the group benefits everyone because everyone can hear the concern and the response to it.
There definitely are concerns which shouldn't / don't need to be shared widely, when they're about specific people or about interpersonal issues. There's also potentially lots of stuff that should be communicated to the team, but they don't need to know the details of the issues. You definitely don't want to start a "John is avoiding work recently" conversation in a group, exactly because everyone can hear it and respond to it. Maybe the manager needs to have a private chat with him, or maybe the manager already knows that John had a death in the family that affects him. Not everything needs to have more people involved.
yes.. but they often concern more then one people...
discussing it public does not necessary means in front of all 60 people but in front of the people relevant to the discussion..
It very well could be a discussing with just one or two subordinates and their teams..
Also he never said he does not have individual meetings to discuss individual concerns.. but those should happen seldomly as needed and not by a mandated weekly schedule..
If you listened to his response it was very much centered on his communication whether he intended it that way or not.
I guess I should have elaborated more about the ICs. With experienced employees they should know how to provide feedback to a larger group, but you don't necessarily have that with junior or intermediate ICs who don't always have the confidence to say anything if you didn't provide them with a space to provide feedback or just have a complaining session.
It can also be just the possibility that feedback could be taken as personally attacking someone in a group setting. How does someone differentiate between general feedback and passive aggressive feedback singling them out? For someone that may not "fit in" with the group they are part of it is a real concern they have to consider. I can think of many examples where this is the case where the suitable action is to either give or receive feedback in a more private environment.
I talk to my manager everyday anyway, so a dedicated meeting to “catch up” isn’t really necessary. If there was a goal and we need to set up a check in meeting for that specific goal, that would make sense.
I don't see the point in one-on-ones with someone who produces less for the organization than I do.
I also don't see the point of managers for that matter.
I will work to eliminate all managers from my organization until it's just me, the clients, and the revenues going in my pocket. That's fair and square business.
Managers are excess to any requirement other than someone rich pocketing the revenue who did not do the work.
I will place more value on Huang's leadership insights if he is managing people in a "normal" business (i.e. competition, not driven by a single hi-tech monopoly product, etc). It is easy to provide leadership insights when the whole world is dumping cash on your company for a product only you make.
Nvidia didn’t start there - they took down a lot of established competitors in the GPU space, and a lot of other big companies are gunning for their position. I’d say their business operations and leadership are definitely worth studying.
That said, I’ve managed people that absolutely needed regularly-scheduled one-on-ones, because they needed the dedicated time and space to bring things up that they otherwise wouldn’t in the normal course of business.
It really depends on the employee in question. I don’t think a one-size-fits-all approach works here.