alt Hacker News> Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.
Dude, a a weekly 1:1 should be 30 minutes long. And managers should have at most 10 directs, so 5 hours total out of a 40 hour work week. Something has gone haywire and it's not the 1:1 thats the problem.
> I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people. ... All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.
Yes, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them. But what you describe does not sound like a 1:1. At most it's a cross-functional meeting, and should have multiple people from both sides.
> The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.
It sounds like someone got halfway through the ManagerTools guidance on 1:1s and decided they could improvise a better solution and failed. The purpose of 1:1s is to build and keep relationships, and they encourage this chitchat as relationship building, but the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_. If you want to talk about work that's great! The best way to build a relationship is working towards a common goal, and work is pretty much the only expected common goal anyways. And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda -- if a manager wants time on a direct's calendar they can always ask for more, but the reverse is much harder.
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I worked at a place where the manager had, at the height of the organization's growth, five reports. He couldn't handle that many 1:1's so, at one point, he made them into a "group" 1:1. Of course, that made no sense. Eventually his manager reversed the decision. I'm honestly sure what he did all day, but he eventually got laid off.
The best companies I worked for had no 1:1's. Eventually the company was acquired and the practice was "installed" by the acquirer.
> the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_.
How about if the direct has absolutely no interest in talking about anything because they are just trying to do their job, which is going fine? Because that's 99%, maybe 100% of these meetings I've ever had.
> Dude, a a weekly 1:1 should be 30 minutes long. And managers should have at most 10 directs, so 5 hours total out of a 40 hour work week. Something has gone haywire and it's not the 1:1 thats the problem.
I agree wholeheartedly, but this company culture had different ideas than you and I.
Their idea of a 1:1 was that it was the formal and correct way to synchronize people. It wasn’t limited to managers and their reports.
This shows up a lot in companies with matrix-style org charts. You end up with product managers and designers assigned to 3 different teams and setting up 1:1s with their managers and certain ICs to sync. Then their managers set up 1:1s with the managers of the other teams. Instead of being a tree it turns into a giant graph with edges everywhere.
> And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda
Now imagine this multiplied by 10 1:1s. That’s almost two hours of a manager keeping people captive on Zoom repeating stories from their weekend. Now imagine this practice was semi-standardized as the ideal way to run 1:1s at this company, so each employee had to spend the first 10m of every 1:1 with their manager, their product manager, their design lead, their team lead, and other people following the template listening to their weekend plans. Now imagine that you get pressured to reciprocate because after they spend all that time talking about themselves they need to ask about your weekend and pull a response out so they don’t feel awkward.
Sounds insane? It was! I almost wouldn’t have believed it until I experienced it. I couldn’t believe how many people at the company acted like it was normal and good.
> es, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them.
I was in a manager role at the company I’m describing. I got reprimanded on my performance review for not having enough 1:1s and for declining 1:1s with people who were not my reports (they tried to claim I was shutting them out and preventing them from doing their job)
Trust me, the problem was not a lack of managers. It was the giant interconnected graph of too many managers trying to set up recurring meetings with each other because that was the expectation.