When Your One-on-Ones Quietly Turn Into Status Meetings

A director of engineering told me her one-on-ones were great. So I asked her to walk me through one of those recent one-on-ones, and here's what she said: "Well, first, my employee, my direct report, gave me her updates on a launch, and then I gave her mine on the leadership team's priorities.

We also talked about, resourcing questions and a few other smaller tasks, and then we wrapped up." Now, that sounds like a meeting, but that is not a one-on-one in the playbook of leadership on management.

More specifically, it is two status reports stacked on top of each other, right? The engineering leader's, uh, status update first, and then the employee status update came right after. Two things stacked together. And this engineering director, by the way, is by all means not an exception, because most managers don't have a, "I'm not doing one-on-ones," type of problem.

Most of them do have one-on-ones, but they have a, "My one-on-ones quietly turned into status meetings, and I don't like it," kinda problem. Okay?

They start to realize that over time, their one-on-ones could be replaced by a Slack message or by a dashboard or an email, and that they're not actually having the one-on-one meetings that a manager should have with the direct reports. It's a meeting, but it's not the one-on-one. So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through, three specific reasons one-on-ones drift into these status updates.

We're gonna talk about four specific fixes that you can use this week in your next one-on-ones, one closing technique that builds continuity between meetings, so Nothing that you discuss disappears the moment that the call ends.

My name is Ramona Shah and I'm the host of the Manager Track podcast.

so if you feel like, "Yes, I don't have the one-on-ones fully figured out yet," they somehow turn into status meetings or they still feel somewhat awkward, then know that you're not an exception. It's actually pretty common for managers to get into this space that, yes, initially, the one-on-ones were set up, pretty structured.

There was a good agenda. There was a bit of the interpersonal stuff that are part of a one-on-one. a lot of managers put some thought into it before they schedule those, or at least they try to imitate what maybe a previous manager did with them. But then over time, that starts to dissipate, and they go back to the status meetings.

And if that is you, then know that this is part of a learning journey. This is somewhat normal, but you have to understand that, hey- This needs to be fixed because we can't just accept the standard that's not effective. But before we get to, the fixes, and we will talk about those in this episode,

We have to understand what is actually broken. So the way that you would fix a status meeting is different from how you fix a relationship problem. And most managers diagnose this wrong when it comes to one-on-ones, because there are three specific patterns, and they tend to layer on top of each other over months.

Okay, let's get specific on what are some of the patterns of ineffective one-on-ones. The first one is when the manager runs the agenda, because whoever drives the meeting controls what gets talked about.

So when you drive, you default to what is top of mind for you, which tends to be work and not the person in front of you. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just that you probably have a lot of pressure and stress and urgency about the work. You also want to make sure the work is, being done and it's done in the quality that you want it.

So your brain will naturally prioritize that conversation over checking in with the person. And so this pattern is, often invisible because it looks productive. Like you write the agenda or you have your notes, you are prepared, the meeting flows, it seems effective and efficient, and you personally walk away feeling like a good manager, like you really made use of that time.

The problem is that your direct report walked into a meeting with you and walked out without any, raising any of the things that they actually needed to talk about b-beyond what was in your list. And those things start to build.

Sometimes it's tasks questions, something they're unsure about, but oftentimes it's the emotional things or any dissonance that they feel with how they wanna show up and what they experience a team to be, or work that they're unsure who does what or how is it get done, maybe other conflicts or other problems that they're starting to pick up on.

That's what they wanna bring to your attention, but there's no time for that. So that's pattern number one. Pattern number two is that status is always easier than substance. So how is this launch going is a much lower risk question than where do you feel stuck in your career?

Status, that first question, lets both of you stay in this professional armor. Substance on the other hand, asks you to take this armor off and to share more, maybe vulnerable or at least more transparently.

And so when the calendar is packed, you're in back-to-backs, and the quarter's closing or deadlines are looming, then the conversation defaults to the version that requires the least vulnerability and emotional effort from either of you.

And what do we then do? We remove substance, and we default to status updates. Pattern number three is that there is no commitment loop. So nothing that was said in a meeting carries over to the next week. Yes, you do have a real conversation.

They do tell you something true, and you do take note or you let AI transcribe it or whatnot. But next week, both of you come back and there's no, pattern detection. It's just going right back into a new conversation about other status updates and what's going on that kinda overwrites the old one.

And after, let's say, four months or so, both of you have Kind of concluded that one-on-ones are status updates and nothing beyond that. Even feedback and suggestions.

If you notice that one of your team members consistently... is not really detail-oriented, and they're always the things, the small things that you seem to pick up left and right, you might bring that up in a one-on-one and you say, "Hey, you need to check this out," or, "Also look at that," or, "By the way, whatever happened to this conversation in an email chain?

Did you ever follow up with them? Okay, great. Can you follow up? Can you send that? Can you finish this?" You give them these suggestions or these directions or orders, so to speak, of what they need to do. That all sounds good, but no one ever talks about, "Hey, what is up with this pattern? Like, why are we in every one-on-one having this conversation where I have to tell you to go close the loop on conversations in email chains, or to follow up with someone, or to finish a pending task, or to catch details in a report, or make small adjustments that I have given you feedback on four times in a row, and I still see the same things happening.

What is that about?" So it's the meta conversations about those patterns we're picking up. If this one-on-one is a status-driven meeting, those things will never be discussed. Those patterns that are actually most important for career development and for the relationship and for, skill training and all of that, they're not part of it.

So with that said, let me quickly recap the three patterns. We had the first one, the manager owns the agenda instead of the direct report owning it.

The second one was status over substance When substance is what we really wanna talk about. And then the third one is that there's no follow-up to previous conversations or detecting patterns. now I'm gonna move into the four specific fixes that directly map to one of those three patterns.

Fix one is to actually hand them the agenda. This seems pretty straightforward, but yet, just because we know it or it seems obvious, doesn't mean that it, this is what is actually being done in real life. Okay. Hand them the agenda. This is the single highest leverage change that you can make, and managers keep resisting it for weeks because it feels like giving up control when there's no need for that.

This is not about control. The one-on-one shouldn't be, by all means, about control. So hand that agenda over to your direct report. Make it really clear. So the day before each one-on-one, you can send a couple of, prompts, what do you want to think through this week?"

For example, "Hey, ahead of our one-on-one, please remember to prepare what you want to think through this week. Where do you want my input? Where are you stuck?" Now, the goal is not for you to always send them those reminders, but maybe as you're making a shift, give it a couple of weeks, usually about two weeks that people need in order to adjust to a manager's new behavior.

Even if the manager is very explicit about it, it s- still takes some time for the, new dynamics to kick in. So maybe for two weeks, send that the day before the one-on-one so that they're coming in it with the right frame of mind to engage and they're prepared to lead. Then in the meeting, let them open.

give them the floor and even say, "You got the floor. Where do you wanna start?" And then stay quiet for, I wanna say, at least a minute, right? Pause. And if the pause feels long, you're probably doing it right. Don't fill it. Don't jump in. Don't already lean in while they're still finishing the sentences because you wanna contribute or say something or answer.

Hold back. Give it space. Let them fully express themselves before you chime in. When you do this, the things they would never have brought up if you had been steering the conversation from the start or interjected too quickly suddenly start to surface. It might be a judgment call that they've been chewing on.

It could be friction with a peer. It could be the fact that they're not sure they want this role, or they're not sure how to execute on a project. All of these things will start to bubble up if you give them the space. And if you have time for nothing else this week, this would be the one thing I encourage you to do.

So that's fix number one. Fix number two is to completely kill the status update. Status updates can totally go in writing. The one-on-one is then for the conversation that a status cannot capture. It'd be very ineffective to email forth and back forever. So the next time that your direct report opens with a project update or starts to get into that, you can interject and say, "Hold on one second.

Can you send this to me in writing instead? I wanna make sure that we use this time in our one-on-one for what you couldn't put into a Slack message or in an email. And I promise you, I'll be on the lookout for that email or that Slack message, and I will get back to you with any input I might have." It will likely feel rude the first time. Generally, like interrupting people can feel rude, but it won't be. It actually resets the contract of what this one-on-one is supposed to be, right? one-on-one meeting is for the thing that does not fit in a written update.

The, again, the judgment calls, the blockers, the things that they don't wanna flag publicly, the capacity concerns, the early signals that they're starting to notice some conflict, some tension, some disengagement, and they may not know how to say that. How do you put that in a Slack message? And what you probably notice is that if you redirect once, maybe a second time, they start to pick up on it, and they start to change. They won't be coming back to you with a list of project updates, and they start coming in with the actual hard stuff, which is what you both want for these one-on-ones to be useful and productive.

If everything we just covered is exactly the thing that you've been trying to fix on your own, I wanna point you to something that might be helpful. We've built a sixty-minute on-demand course called

Making the Most of One-on-One Meetings. that turn your one-on-ones from awkward and unproductive into strategic and high impact.

You get agenda templates that you can copy. You get an arsenal of curated questions that you can use in those one-on-ones, and a section specifically for managing remote one-on-ones and where actually most of these patterns can get worse.

This entire course and these resources are only nineteen dollars, and you get through the whole thing in sixty minutes. You'll have a downloadable workbook to keep as a reference and access to all the resources mentioned.

Check out the link in the description to get access to this one-on-one course. Okay, back to the episode.

There is a body of research that explains why these fixes work even though they feel a bit counterintuitive.

So if you understand the mechanism, you will trust the method when it feels uncomfortable to use.

And so let me shed some light on some of these, because when you understand why we're making these suggestions, then you are more likely to follow through on it, even if it feels uncomfortable.

So the first one is that the manager itself accounts for seventy percent of an engagement variance. So in employee engagement studies, seventy percent of the variance is due to the the direct manager. And this is by Gallup State of the Global Workplace research, and the finding has been held steady for over a decade.

It's not company culture, it's not the compensation, but it is the manager that has the biggest impact on employee engagement. And the behavior most correlated with engagement is the quality of weekly or biweekly one-on-one conversations. The meeting that you might not want on your new calendar is actually the most important hour of your week.

Now the second one that I wanna highlight is that employee-led agendas produce twice the insights.

And this is research from the Center of Creative Leadership and parallel work in coaching psychology that shows that when employees set the agenda for development conversations, the conversations produce roughly twice the actionable insights compared to manager-led conversations.

People will surface their real issues when they are not being interviewed about someone else's priorities. When they don't have to give status updates. That is when the real problems, the real barriers will start to bubble up. Now, one more, the last one here. Psychological safety predicts whether teams learn or not.

Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety shows that the willingness to surface problems and mistakes and gaps in confidence is actually the single biggest predictor of whether a team learns and adapts.

The thing that suppresses it the most is the perception that a manager is in evaluation mode, constantly making judgments. And so when you open your one-on-ones with status and checking in on where they stand on their deliverables, your direct report's brain reads it as, "Oh my gosh,

They are checking in on whether or not I'm performing." On the other side, when you open with their agenda, the kind of message that you're sending is, "Oh, they're helping me think through problems." Right? Two different conversations, even if the words are somewhat identical.

Now, for most managers, they're very well-intended. They mean well. They try to make the most out of the time together, and they're not running ineffective meetings because they're not disciplined. They're running it that way because it's the default architecture of one-on-one biases towards these type of evaluation and the control that we perceive when we have status update, when we know what's going on, and we, don't feel like anything is falling through the cracks.

And if someone asks us, we would know because we just had a one-on-one. It's this perceived sense of control that gives us this bias to wanna always gravitate towards the work conversation. So we have to redesign this architecture. We have to change it and instead say, "Now wait a second.

Just because that's what I'm inclined to do because of my bias, that is not what's effective, and that's not what I'm going to do, even if it feels uncomfortable." Right? As leaders, we're not optimizing for comfort. We're optimizing for effectiveness.

okay, so we covered the first fix, which was to hand them the agenda, and then we also covered the second fix, which is to kill the status update. Now let's talk about fix number three, and this is to use the four-question rotation.

Most one-on-ones can feel like Groundhog Day because the surface area of the conversation is kinda too narrow. We're not touching on much. And so how to change that and not just start with like, "Hey, what's going on?" Or, "How are you doing?" Is to create different questions for different times or different weeks.

And what I found is that this framework doesn't work forever, but it's a great starting point to explore different aspects of your employee direct report relationship and what's going on for your direct report without it feeling repetitive or like you're running out of topics.

and so consider applying this rotation in your upcoming one-on-ones. I'm gonna walk through what that exactly looks like next.

Okay, the first one is priorities and blockers. What are you working on? What is in the way? What do you need from me? Are the main questions that you wanna start off. So that might be week one.

Priorities and blockers. Then week two, you shift gear a bit, and you start to focus more on growth and skill building. You start asking questions like, "Hey, where do you wanna be in a year from now? What skills are you developing right now that you find useful and you wanna continue to develop? And what do you feel like you need to practice more, and you need to have more opportunities to put these skills to the test?"

That may be week two, so growth and skills. And then week three, you might start to shift a bit and talk about relationships and team dynamics. How are things going with your peers? Are there tensions I should know about? Where is collaboration friction showing up between you and maybe other departments, other teams, or within our team?

What's going on? So those are the relationship type questions that you wanna focus on. And then maybe the week after, in week four, you start to talk about energy, capacity, and maybe prioritization, or more specifically, what they need to deprioritize, especially if they feel like really high up on that capacity scale.

Questions such as, "How is your workload? What should we stop doing? What is training you that doesn't really need to be? What is something that you should be delegating or you should be passing on, or that we as a team should no longer be doing? To check in on what is maybe no longer useful in the team, what is it that they should be doing, but also what's their energy level?

And by the way, I find it difficult for most people to give a good answer to the question: What's your energy level? It's like, "I don't know. It's good. It's fine." We get, like, these one words back. What I find a lot more useful is to ask a scaling question. "Hey, on a scale from one to ten, with ten being you are supercharged and one being you're super tired, what is your energy level this week?"

Similarly, with the capacity from, one, I got absolutely nothing to do, to ten, I am fully at my capacity, not quite sure yet how it's gonna all fit into my schedule. Where are you currently? And they may give you a five, a six, a seven, and then you can ask follow-up questions. "Oh, okay. Good to know.

What would bring you down to a five? What's one thing that you can drop to get out of a five?" If the five is what you, you know, consider to be optimal, and you can de-determine that. Uh, or if someone says on an energy level, "I'm at like an eight." What's the reason for this being at an eight? What's the main contributor this week? So you can ask those follow-up questions, and you usually get a lot more out of it with the scaling questions. But again, with all of this, the point is not to control the conversation. It is to create space for four different kinds of conversations over a month. And by week four, you will have a far richer picture of how this person is actually doing than three months of status meetings would ever give you.

And so let them have the agenda, let them talk through what they wanna talk about, but then you have a backup plan that if kind of the conversation dies out, there's nothing more to share, you know what you wanna talk about, and you can come in and ask those questions and let them respond and elaborate.

Similar to the prep questions, I do suggest to send those questions to your direct report up front. Like saying here's how I'd like to have our one-on-ones to flow over the next few months.

This is a topic each week. Bring whatever's on your mind, but use the topic as a prompt. And then you can kinda list out what you wanna, talk about, or you could do it week by week. But often, and especially for people who are not very talkative or somewhat reserved, or people who need to or prefer to think through, their, thought processes and what's really going on before sharing information with you as their manager.

Especially those people who really appreciate having a heads-up versus being confronted with, "Hey, what's draining your energy?" They're like, "Wait, what? I didn't expect that conversation 'cause we've never really had it." And so they may feel unprepared. Okay, quick recap.

Week one was about priorities and blockers. Week two would be about growth and skill building. Week three about relationships and team dynamics, and in week four about energy capacity and what to drop. That was fix number three.

Moving on to fix number four, which is to coach before you advise. So when your direct reports brings you a problem, the version of you that built your career as an IC, an individual contributor, likely wants to solve that thing in thirty seconds because you know you could, most likely.

But do not. Really resist that urge. You're gonna ask questions before you give any opinion or solution. Ask, " What have you already tried? What are you considering? What would you do if I weren't available?" And the third one is often the unlock, right? About half the time when you ask what they do without you, the answer comes out their mouth, and they realize they already knew it before you even say anything.

You did not need to weigh in. Now, the other half of the time, your input will land harder because they have already done the thinking, and now you're just bridging the gap.

Now, one thing to pay attention to, and there's a bit of a risk when you use coaching, which is that When you ask these questions, it can seem like fake coaching, where you kinda already know what you want them to say, and you are slow walking them into it.

Do not. If you actually have a strong opinion and the situation is high stakes, and there's no wiggle room, and you know for a fact they don't already have the answer, just say it. Don't pretend to wanna coach and, hear their thoughts when you actually don't care at all. Um- Um, here's what I do, here's why.

What do you think? Straightforward. It's not coaching, it's just assessing the situation. Any other time, come with this curious mind and ask the questions first. Okay, these were our four fixes. Now, one more thing I wanna share. The thing that solves the third drift pattern, this like no commitment loop, is straightforward.

It's a two-minute close. In the last two minutes of every one-on-one, both of you write down one thing that you'll each do before the next meeting. Not five things, but one. Specific enough to be checkable. So I'm getting better at delegation does not count.

That's not specific. But hand off the XYZ project status update to Mark by Friday. That's very specific. Then after they've gone through the agenda, if they've not already volunteered the information, you start off by saying "Hey, before we move into other quickly checking in on the two things we agreed on last week.

What happened with that handoff to, whatever happened with that project, update handoff that you gave to Mark?

Takes forty-five seconds at the top, and it's really important to create this commitment loop, into it. Sometimes it's about a career conversations. It might be about exposing themselves to a new sort of a bit of a stretch assignment. It might be, working on a specific skill, but it could also be something a bit more tactical that was related to what you talked about, such as delegation or prioritization.

With that, then each one-on-one becomes the next chapter of a conversation, and it feels like you're actually making progress. And if you know you are going to be asked about it in seven days, you start to not agree to things you do not intend to do, and neither do they. So it actually fosters a sense of self-commitment on the team.

Now, if you do nothing else from this episode, do the two-minute close. It's the low-hanging fruit, easy to do, takes a couple of minutes, and you might already start to see that behavioral change in the way that you lead. every time I teach this, there are different objections that come up. Like, I don't have time for this every week. Well, I'd say you do not have time for the alternative. The fully loaded cost of a disengaged direct report quietly checking out for six months before quitting in six to nine months for a replacement ramp up and then lost institutional knowledge and all of that, nothing compared to the thirty minutes or forty-five minutes a week, that you spend on one-on-ones.

It literally is like the cheapest insurance policy that you will ever buy. Second objection, my direct report doesn't bring anything to discuss. Okay, this is the fix to a problem. They have been trained for months now to treat the meeting as a manager check-in because that's what it's been.

So three weeks of consistent prep prompt, and that will change. Just give it a few weeks for this new behavior to adopt. Now, another objection sometimes that I get is what if they want to vent and I need them to focus because we got stuff to do? Okay. First ten minutes of a thirty-minute meeting, let's say, are theirs.

Let them get into it, but also you have to cut it if they, it turns into a venting conversation. Unless you truly feel like this is what they re- need right now and it's a one-off. If it turns into a pattern, you have to address the pattern that all your one-on-ones seem to be about venting, not about actions and problem-solving.

And then make sure that, yes, they're leading the agenda, but that doesn't mean that you can't bring topics to the conversation. So at some point, you might also say "Hey, can we come to a specific action item or something we wanna do with this so that we still have time in our call today to also talk about XYZ?"

Now, most managers run one-on-ones the way they run other meetings, like with a goal, an agenda, and an outcome they are driving towards.

And that is the right mode for 90% of your meetings, but it's the wrong mode for this one. The one-on-one is the only meeting on your calendar where the goal is the relationship itself, not a decision or an output. Relationships do not get built by effectively transferring information back and forth.

They get built by one person consistently showing up, being curious about the other.

So with that, send your direct report the three prep prompts before your next one-on-one. Let them open a meeting, stay quiet for the first 60 seconds, And those changes will tell you more about how your one-on-ones have actually been running than anything else I said.

The version of you that hosts one-on-ones that builds teams who can think without you because you train them to do this, to have this critical thinking on their own,

Learning all of this is a soft skill. It's a manager skill, and it is part of your responsibility and your job as a manager. Most of us weren't born this way in knowing how to do this, so it's all part of training to be a leader and a manager to your team. So again, check out the 60-minute video. So again, check out that, check out... So again, if you wanna go deeper, check out that video course and additional resources and a bunch of questions that will make these one-on-ones so much easier.

The link is in the show note. And if you wanna learn more about our 90-day manager readiness program, The Leadership Accelerator, you'll find that linked in the show notes too. I'll see you next week with another episode of "The Manager Track" podcast. Thanks for now.

if you enjoyed this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader people love to work with. This includes a free masterclass on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out at archova.org/masterclass. The second resource is my bestselling book, The Confident and Competent New Manager, How to Rapidly Rise to Success in Your First Leadership Role.

Check it out at archova.org/books or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there