This podcast discusses the overwhelming culture of one-on-one meetings in organizations, the negative impact they can have on team dynamics, and the potential alternative of using a lean coffee format instead.
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Quick takeaways
Shift the focus of one-on-one meetings towards development, advice, feedback, and coaching.
Begin one-on-one meetings with a short retrospective, reflecting on what went well and what didn't go so well since the last meeting.
Deep dives
Replace one-on-ones with a lean coffee meeting
Instead of having individual one-on-one meetings, invite key stakeholders to a lean coffee or less coffee meeting. This allows for group interaction, the sharing of information, and the generation of specific conversation topics. Through this format, multiple topics can be covered and it promotes a shared understanding among participants.
Focus on development in one-on-ones
Shift the focus of one-on-one meetings towards development, advice, feedback, and coaching. Use this time to have deeper conversations and provide guidance to each other. Encourage both parties to seek and offer advice, creating a supportive and growth-oriented environment.
Start with a retrospective in one-on-ones
Begin one-on-one meetings with a short retrospective, where both parties reflect on what went well and what didn't go so well since the last meeting. This written exercise allows for greater introspection and can lead to more meaningful discussions during the meeting.
Ask the other person what they need from you
When discussing topics in one-on-one meetings, always ask the other person what they need from you or what would be helpful. This shifts the focus from offering unsolicited advice to providing assistance based on their specific needs, fostering more effective and purposeful conversations.
1:1s (or one-on-ones) are a ubiquitous part of our daily working lives. These two-person meetings (a manager + a direct report = a classic 1:1) are meant to be a space for diving into individual challenges, fostering trust, building stronger relationships, and providing a forum for feedback and recognition. When designed with intention, they can be great.
But at some point, 1:1s jumped the shark. Today, we see more and more companies with an overwhelming “1:1 culture,” where calendars are packed with a million two-person meetings (on top of lots of other meetings), leaving precious little time to get work done. Worse still, most 1:1s include our worst meeting habits: over-indexing on status updates, information hoarding, and bureaucratic theater. What gives?
In this episode of At Work with The Ready, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin meet one-on-one (see what we did there?) to explore why 1:1 cultures take hold in organizations, the cost that comes with doing them poorly, how to rely on them less, and how to start making the ones you do keep count.