Regular readers of The New Leader will know that I’m a big, big advocate of one-on-one meetings. Often saying that if you get these right, then everything else that you do as a manager will be far easier.
I stand by this.
But…
They can sometimes work against you and today, I want to address when this can happen and hopefully help you avoid falling into the trap of becoming ineffective as a result of them.
Ironically, being “people-first” and trying to ensure that you spend as much time as possible supporting your team can work against you. The traditional advice to “have more one-on-ones” in order to solve problems, may actually be creating even more problems for you to deal with in the long term.
The hidden cost of excessive meetings for managers
Imagine over the course of a day, that you need to constantly switch between:
- Individual meetings
- Team meetings
- External meetings
- Your to-do list
- Slack / Team chats
There is a cognitive cost of switching between conversations and contexts, you effectively “lose” time and headspace each time that you make a switch.
When you’re a manager, especially of a growing team, individual meetings can quickly dominate your calendar. The work that you need to oversee and delegate can grow exponentially too.
The compounding effect of this can be that you become ineffective at all or most of these things. You can start to struggle with the quality and speed of decision making.
Basically, meetings can end up overwhelming you if you’re not careful. As a manager, one-on-one meetings can be one of the biggest contributors to this.
How one-on-one meetings can work against you
Let’s talk specifically about one-on-one meetings for a moment, because whilst meetings as a whole can cause various problems, there are less obvious challenges with one-on-ones that you should be aware of.
The queue effect leading to delayed action
When you run one-on-one meetings, you may end up with your team waiting for this time with you before they move forward with a task or project. You may end up accidentally becoming a bottleneck for multiple members of your team.
The scaled up effect of this is that projects can be delayed across the team because one-on-one meetings are seen as a time to get approvals from you.
Peer-to-peer relationships don’t develop
Ideally, you want to get to a point where your team is working directly with each other to solve problems and move projects forward. They shouldn’t rely on you and understand when they can just crack on with work and when they do need to involve you.
One-on-one meetings can actually prevent this from happening. You may end up becoming the person on the team who they speak to the most about projects. Instead of discussing problems with each other, they discuss all of those problems with you because you usually have all of the answers! So why would they go to their peers when they can always get a guaranteed answer from you?
Decision making and problem solving is seen as hierarchical
If your team is using one-on-one meeting time to ask for approval on decisions or for you to solve problems for them, then they will become accustomed to the idea that decisions are made “above them” rather than by the team. They won’t believe that decisions can be made or that problems can be solved without going to a more senior person first.
Suffice to say, this slows down your team and their ability to develop their own skills. It can also mean that they don’t feel accountable or responsible for their own work – because you (or another senior team member) is making all of the key decisions.
How to avoid these problems
Right, let’s look at a few ways that you can foresee and hopefully avoid these issues before they become problematic for you.
Regularly review recurring meetings
One-off or ad-hoc meetings aren’t usually the cause of these kinds of problems. It’s the build up of recurring meetings in your calendar that can blindside you.
When you first become a manager or have a small team, it’s fine – you schedule a handful of recurring meetings perhaps once a week or once a month, it all looks very manageable – and it is.
But then you take on another team member or two, along with another couple of projects, then you’re asked to join another senior team meeting each week.
Before you know it, you’re spending a big chunk of your week in recurring meetings and you’re not quite sure how it happened.
Once a quarter, set a reminder for yourself to review all recurring meeting invites and ask yourself three questions:
- Do you still need to attend this meeting?
- Do you need to attend every occurrence? (For example – could you go from weekly to bi-weekly?)
- Does this meeting need to happen at the same frequency or can it be reduced?
Every so often, this will lead to you being able to reduce your meetings and it is unlikely to have a negative impact on your work, relationships or results.
Do all team members need the same volume of one-on-ones?
As a general rule, the more senior someone in your team becomes, the less one-on-one time they need from you. This means that for a senior person, perhaps they just need to chat with you once every two weeks, rather than once a week.
You could even move to once a month if they are senior enough to know when they should schedule an ad-hoc meeting to cover urgent matters.
Don’t be afraid of making changes to your meeting schedule if your team doesn’t actually need to see you that often.
Offer office-hour style time blocks
If you do reduce the number of one-on-one meetings that you have with your team, you can protect the risk of missing something by offering “office hour” style meetings instead.
This means that once a week, you have an hour set aside where anyone can come and see you or jump on a call to discuss something. So if you’re not meeting as regularly one-on-one, there is still a time blocked out for the team to speak with you if they need to.
Regularly review your one-on-one agendas (and stick to them)
I’m a big fan of simple, recurring agendas with one-on-one meetings because they can help you be efficient and effective in covering key issues.
But sometimes, they may need to be changed, mixed up a bit and generally freshened up in order to keep engagement high. So don’t be afraid of changing the agenda and focus of your one-on-one meetings if things feel like they are getting a bit stale.
Stale one-on-one meetings will quickly become demotivating for both of you and make the problems above even more likely to happen.
You also need to stay on track and ensure that you’re not being used as a sign off point (when you shouldn’t be) or that the team is simply using this time for you to solve their problems for them.
Overall, I’m still a big advocate of one-on-one meetings and always will be. But they should still be regularly reviewed and iterated on so that they don’t become stale, pointless and lead to you becoming overwhelmed by them.
