Concept
The one-on-one
The one-on-one is the regular meeting between a manager and one direct report that Andrew Grove treats as the subordinate's meeting: their agenda, their problems, most of the talking theirs, with the manager listening, asking one level deeper and teaching when asked. It is among a manager's highest-leverage hours.
The most ignored rule of the one-on-one is whose it is. The manager who fills it with status updates and instructions has turned it into a reporting meeting and lost the only regular channel through which the problems people do not raise in a group would have reached them. Grove has the subordinate write the agenda beforehand and the manager ask past the answers: what happened, why, what would you do differently. He set the frequency by the person's task-relevant maturity: weekly for someone new to the work, every few weeks for an experienced veteran. He wanted each one to last at least an hour, long enough for the difficult issues to come up. Whatever the cadence, keep it: a cancelled one-on-one tells the person they are less important than whatever replaced them, and people receive that message accurately. Grove's rule of thumb was that ninety minutes in a one-on-one can improve the quality of a subordinate's work for two weeks. Kim Scott adds what the time is also for: it is where caring personally is proven, meeting after meeting, so that when the direct challenge comes it lands on trust.
A real-life example
The head of a twelve-nurse night shift at a hospital in Eskişehir used to talk to her nurses one by one only when something had gone wrong. She starts an hour every fortnight with each nurse, on the nurse's agenda, and every week for the two who joined this year. In the third round a nurse who never speaks at handover tells her that a monitor on the ward has been giving false alarms for weeks, and that the team has learned to ignore it.
How to use it
- 1Keep the same slot for each person; cancel only when you would cancel a client meeting.
- 2Ask them to bring the agenda; open with what is on your mind, and ask one level deeper.
- 3Keep notes you reread before the next one; the pattern across weeks is the information.