I perceive the routine of regular 1:1 meetings as detrimental.
I’m referring to the kind of meetings that are:
I discern the following negative impacts:
If a routine meeting is set up simply for the sake of maintaining a regular schedule — for example, because a manager read somewhere that 1:1s should be regularly conducted, or because it was mandated by the CTO — then it inherently lacks a rational justification. You are meeting without a clear reason.
I believe that completing routines out of habit and expectation can detrimentally impact intellectual work, which ideally should be guided by rationality and awareness. At the very least, it conditions people to the notion that it’s acceptable to disengage their critical thinking and blindly follow practices because others are doing so.
What is the rationale behind conducting 1:1s at regular intervals instead of when they are genuinely needed?
Does it make sense that a need for discussion emerges precisely every two weeks? If that’s not the case, then what’s the point of the meeting? Conversely, if the need arises more or less frequently than every two weeks, wouldn’t it be better to tackle the issue immediately when it surfaces?
This suggests that maintaining a regular schedule of meetings, rather than adopting a “just in time” approach, prompts the employee and the manager to “hold off and pile up” topics. Doesn’t this represent unnecessary waste?
There’s an argument that employees might struggle to evaluate if a certain issue is worth bringing up to the manager, and that 1:1 meetings are the perfect opportunity for such discussions.
It’s also claimed that an employee might find it hard to articulate and present problems, so it’s beneficial for the team leader to extract these issues from him during regular 1:1 meetings.
From this perspective, instead of the employee developing the skill to articulate problems and present them in a timely manner (push), they become accustomed to having the problems extracted from them (pull).
Moreover, rather than encouraging the employee to discern what they can resolve independently (or with the assistance of the team or others), and what truly needs immediate escalation, habitual 1-1 meetings accustom the employee to merely wait. It appears evident that instead of fostering intellectual abilities and professional growth, regular 1-1 meetings risk reducing the employee’s role to a passive participant, similar to “confession on Sundays”.
Consequently, regular 1-1 meetings may not aid the employee in learning to appropriately articulate problems, nor in deciding when they can tackle issues themselves or with the team, and when it’s necessary to promptly bring the issue to the team leader’s attention.
In a team, people are united and together strive to achieve a certain goal. In teams, one’s problems are solved at the team level, and only if the problem can’t be solved does the team request help.
As soon as the manager establishes that an employee’s problems are being resolved in 1:1 sessions with the manager, and then goes on to solve these emerging problems, they reinforce the pattern of employees solving problems with the manager rather than the team solving problems together.
No matter how hard the manager tries to build a team, if they shows by actions that problems are effectively solved by the manager-employee pair, there’s a high probability that the group will never become a team.