The 1:1 I Stopped Doing
Weekly thirty-minute slots with seven directs for two years. The first month I deleted them, nobody noticed. The second month, the team got faster.
For two years I held weekly thirty-minute 1:1s with each of seven direct reports. Three and a half hours a week, every week, on the calendar. The slots were sacred. Skipping one felt like a small betrayal of the management contract.
Then I deleted them for a month, as an experiment. Nobody noticed. The second month, the team got faster.
The 1:1 had become a status meeting in a calendar slot we had agreed to call development. Each report came in with project updates. I asked clarifying questions. The conversation ended when the slot did. The information I got could have been a Slack message. The career conversation I told myself the 1:1 was for happened maybe once a quarter, almost always because the report initiated it, almost never because the slot produced it.
The slot survived because the slot was visible. It signaled that I was a manager who took management seriously. The signaling was for me, not for the team.
The replacement looked like this. No standing 1:1s. A standing thirty-minute open block on my calendar twice a week that anyone could grab without asking. A rule that any report who wanted a 1:1 could request one within twenty-four hours. A real quarterly career conversation, ninety minutes, scheduled in advance, with prep on both sides.
The block filled when there was a real reason. New hires used it weekly for the first quarter. A senior engineer used it twice across six months, both times during specific career inflection points. Two reports never used it at all, and their work didn't suffer — they were operating fine without me in the loop. The status I used to get in the 1:1 came through async updates the team was already writing.
The team got back three and a half hours a week. I got back the same. The career conversations, when they happened, were dramatically better because they were not crammed into a status slot.
The deeper point: the calendar slot is not the management. The slot is the proof that management could be happening. The two are different things. If your 1:1s have become status meetings, killing them does not damage the team. It exposes what the 1:1 was supposed to be doing and forces the question of how to do it on purpose, instead of by default.