I may be in the minority here, but I love 1x1's both as a manager AND employee.

1) I think fast, direct, and consistently timed feedback is crucial to developing myself professionally. Rather than waiting until the semi-annual performance review where everything can come at once and possibly surprise me (either in a good way or bad,) I'd rather have regular measurements and course corrections as necessary.

2) I also really appreciate 1x1's with mentors to learn about how to get to the next level and/or understand broader context with an outside perspective vs. my direct manager or reports.

3) I can understand your point on saying the "wrong thing" -- certain cultures might be a bit more politically charged than others. I try to find mentors or other "work friends" that allow me to have free-roam discussions without concerns of judgement. Some might say this should be your significant other / non-work friends, but I think someone with context of your company/industry would provide better feedback and challenge you a bit -- rather than just provide positive validation that what you're saying is always right.

Mentors are different than managers. Mentors generally do not have direct influence on your career path.

Employees often don't want regular 1:1s because their managers suck, not because 1:1s aren't a useful instrument. Even if you consider the primary role of managers (per another active thread today) to be clearing obstacles and empowering doers to get things done, that by itself is an excellent justification for regular, personal meetings.

I'm sorry you feel the way you do. You must have been burned in the past, or known people who were. That's too bad, and I hope you voted with your feet and found a better manager to work with.

I can only speak from and engineers view but my hope is that I have a good enough relationship with my manager that we can have an open dialogue. You should also have pretty wide berth in what you can say, even if the complaints or comments are unjustified, sometimes people need to vent.

If I was scared to vent to my manager I would be looking for a new job.

Many managers could interpret it as a bad attitude or lack of motivation. As an engineer, I don't like having a financially risky conversation every week or two weeks. There's too many variables and ways to screw up.

I think it depends on where you are and what the market looks like. The only time I felt at all hesitant about shooting straight with my manager was my first job out of college when I didn't know any better. In every subsequent job, I had no fear of unemployment, and without that fear 1:1's became a very enjoyable experience. I could be honest, and that begets honesty in return, and when I was managing people I paid that forward.

You know what puts the fear of unemployment into you? A sudden bout of unexpected unemployment.

Been there. I was your-services-are-no-longer-required at a job in 2013; that's what precipitated my career pivot into devops/platform infrastructure. I was out of work for about eight weeks, five of which were by choice (and my new company paid me a significant bonus to start that early).

That said, yes, the notion of "hey, I could get fired for this" did sometimes enter my head afterwards, but I never feared it, because I knew I had options.

Being in that kind of environment is stressful. If you can't trust the person above you to have your back you're going it alone. I hate working in places you have to feel unreasonably guarded.

Isn't this the norm outside of the Silicon Valley bubble? Maybe everyone I know (including myself) all just happen to have worked for shitty companies all our careers, but I don't know of any company where I would be comfortable "venting" to my manager.

This is probably why:

- Only 30% of employees are engaged

- 50% of employees have left a job to get away from a manager

- 25% of Millennials plan to quit their job in the next year.

Unfortunately, HR is who watches over these issues and are totally disconnected from the root problem (bad management issues). They focus on compliance, lawsuits, and stability. Usually their org is small too, so they have no idea what it's like to have 10 direct reports and constant pressure to ship.

In all seriousness, what do you do that you're so secure with your manager that you have no fear of getting fired for saying or implying the wrong thing?

Every place I've ever worked at groans at the expense of people, and will use every means available to reduce that cost.

It seems we've had very different professional experiences (not a dig at you, seriously).

Most of the places I've worked I have never felt like I needed to bite my tongue, and the couple places where I did, I burned out of quickly because they were such toxic environments.

I'm secure with my manager because the culture of the workplace isn't toxic, and we have aligned goals, and so the 1-on-1 meetings are a good place to discuss issues. We all want to ship product, and so bringing up things that might compromise that shared goal is important.

That said, I have a particular bit of privilege - I have no children or family to support. My finances are excellent and I can support a very long period of unemployment if needed, and I work in a niche that is in-demand where I'd be able to have a new job in the order of hours or days if I were unceremoniously fired. I also keep my professional networks up to date and I interview well.

All of these combine such that I'm basically never stressed about getting fired. If they fire me, shrug. They will likely have a rougher time finding my replacement than I will finding a new job.

To add on to this, if what you are saying is constructive, meant to be meaningful/helpful, and is true- then what fears of getting fired should you have?

Even if you're just bitching about some thing/person/policy that gets on your nerves- if what you're saying isn't slanderous and is true, why should you fear repercussion?

If being candid with your boss means you have to worry about your job, you would probably be happier elsewhere.

This chart says it all: To be engaged at work you have to have a trusting relationship with your manager...

https://getlighthouse.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Ga...

(Source: Gallup State of the American summary: https://getlighthouse.com/blog/gallup-employee-engagement-su...)

I disagree but I don't feel like you deserve to be downvoted for having an opinion that's based off your own experience and also sympathize with you for not having had a chance to work with a manager you feel you can trust.

As an employee, I will say I actually really enjoy one on ones! In fact I think I enjoy them much more than my manager does. I feel like it's a time when I, even as a low level employee, can let the manager know about things that he/she isn't able to see because he/she isn't in the trenches anymore.

Frankly I'm very lucky because I really like my manager; he's the main reason I joined this company. I feel like if I have personal issues that may interfere with work I can talk to him and he'd understand.

Personally I find getting and providing direct feedback is much better than constantly living in fear you're doing something wrong. Plus, sometimes having one on ones can be motivating when your manager tells you about how someone else in the company appreciated your work.

I'm disappointed that you're getting downvoted because I think you're touching on something really important, which is that 1:1s, like everything else in corporate life, have an inherently heavy atmosphere to them. The fact that you're cognizant of this shows that you have some experience under your belt. A good manager will do what he can to ease the situation, but the arrangement of the meeting is substantial and can certainly be risky.

However, while recognizing some flaws that are basically inherent in contemporary corporate structure, I believe 1:1s are extremely important. I think one of the single biggest problems organizations have is that they don't regularly check-in and explicitly solicit feedback. You get so much valuable intelligence this way, even if you're aware of the atmosphere and the incentives that loom over these meetings. The isolation and lack of data really hurt managerial efforts.

This is compounded as you go up the chain. I think that upper management should perform 1:1s all the way down every 3-6 months. This is basically checking middle management's work, something which rarely happens, and it provides the essential pieces of data that get obscured as information travels up the ladder.

> I think that upper management should perform 1:1s all the way down every 3-6 months.

I think this is probably never gonna happen in my company. Top-level managers do not want to have an honest conversation with an employee, because they fear what they might hear and have to respond to. They prefer to do Q&A - speak out prepared answers to pre-reviewed questions. On the other hand, the fact the upper management does not talk to most employees probably helps the product department people enjoy lots of freedom and have a sense of a flat, class-less workplace.

I'm also disappointed to see the downvotes the parent poster is getting. It certainly adds to the conversation. Most places I've worked, a 1:1 with your boss appearing on your calendar meant you screwed something up, and you need to be very careful to make sure you don't say anything career-limiting.

If one on ones aren't normally scheduled, then seeing one popup is definitely cause for anxiety. If the company or manager sets a regular schedule for them, then it shouldn't be cause for pants shitting- unless of course you royally screwed up at some point in recent history.

A long time ago I royally effed up on a project I was working on. It was a Sharepoint project, a deployment went sideways, and I frankly wasn't very good with Sharepoint yet. It lead to some temporary data loss and downtime but I was able to rollback and restore. Anyway, the problems were my fault but my good habits prevented it from being a complete disaster. It was a highly visible fuck up though.

I came in to my one on one, for the first time ever, scared that I was at least going to get an ass chewing. My boss took the time straight out of the gate to praise my good habits for saving the day, and trying to figure out how we could've avoided the issues I caused. The way he approached the meeting completely re-sold me on him as a manager and the company I was working for.

Yes, your manager was an adept politician. I'm glad he was able to handle the issue without alienating you. However, this is not evidence that an honest rapport existed; in fact, it's evidence of the opposite. If your manager was being honest, he probably would've mentioned the performance issue, that it never should've happened, and that it was a frustrating experience.

Instead, the manager made a political calculation: he a) wanted to maintain a good reputation with you, his report, because that makes his job a lot easier, improves his advancement opportunities, etc.; and b) valued your skillset sufficiently that he didn't intend to risk it by dwelling on a failure that he understood you were probably already aware of. His response to you was absolutely political in nature, and not an expression of his honest feelings. The fact that such responses occur is the reason that trepidation is apropos for such meetings.

Just want to say you're crushing it with the comments on this thread manyxcxi! Lots of great experiences and good luck with great managers.

Thanks! I've been managing developers for quite a while now and my approach has been very much influenced by the good and bad I've experienced throughout my career. I have always valued honest and regularly scheduled one on ones and I feel like it is the most critical part of my connection with my team.

I understand the trepidation that can come from employees having to meet with their boss, but I am adamant that a culture of mutual respect that fosters a sense of open communications is possible and if you're doing it right, your employees shouldn't have to worry about what they say in a personal meeting could cost them their job.

Everyone is different, and it takes me a while to figure out how to encourage some people to say whatever is on their minds, but I know that I have done all I could to try and encourage it everywhere I've been.

The possible difference that may ingratiate me more with my teams has been that I've never been completely out of the fray. Even at a Director level I would still be playing Software Architect or even just pitching in as a developer and taking instruction from the Dev lead in the project. Having never left the trenches, it may have helped with the feeling that we're all equal and in it together rather than coming in from the ivory tower to dictate stuff and leave again.

I think if you're that terrified of having a conversation then something is disastrously wrong in your company culture anyway.

I have to second that. If you don't get value out of the 1:1 with your boss, and your boss doesn't get value from you during a 1:1, you need a different boss. I always viewed one of the biggest values of 1:1's is that people on my team could educate me about things I was too distracted/busy to notice or keep up with. It's wickedly hard for a technical manager to both manage and to keep up with the technology the team is using. I always tried to use a part of the 1:1 time to play student and learn whatever my team member thought was important for me to know. Likewise, when managing up during my 1:1 with my higher-level manager, I tried to make sure the most exciting new ideas bubbled up.

One of the best way to weed out bad managers once a company reaches a certain scale is a simple two part system: 1) Make it easier to get an internal hiring req than an external one, and oversubscribe the total headcount budget by a few percent purely with internal hiring reqs. (Guarantee hole flow.) 2) Establish an immutable policy that a losing manager can never block a transfer, ever, for more than a couple of weeks of clean-up/hand-off. Bad managers are then easy to spot by the vacuum that surrounds them.

That's hyperbole on both sides, both the "terrified" part (implying an employee shaking in fear before their 1-1) and "disastrously wrong" (a sweeping write-off of this multidimensional thing called "culture").

Simple truth is a lot of people don't like them, they induce stress for a number of reasons (such as employees' natural instinct to want to "look good" in front of their bosses), and bad 1-1s are often just another annoyance at work -- not a disaster, just not too useful.

That may be true, but it doesn't really change anything. Not everyone has the ability to switch jobs on a whim.

One reason employees don't want these conversations is that they have a shitty manager.

But it can also be that they're a shitty employee. The chance of "saying the wrong thing" is much bigger if you are in fact the wrong person for the job and/or team.

This is probably why Netflix gives a "generous severance package" to people that don't work out. Make it easy to remove bad fits, whether it's the manager or employee.

Totally agree. Even if you like your manager, there's still a huge risk of saying the wrong thing and being labeled a problem child.

I'm worried that 1-1s are becoming the next Agile - just another process used to increase control under the guise of empowerment

This is why it's important to talk about what to do in them. Bad managers make them status updates and talk about projects. Good ones get into feedback, coaching, fixing problems, growth and development, etc.

Coincidentally, this is why I started a company, GetLighthouse.com to tackle this and the general problem of bad people management practices. It's amazing what a little structure, best practices, and automating can do to improve things for a manager and their team.

Sounds terrible, but good luck!

"feedback, coaching, fixing problems, growth and development" are the kinds of things that I definitely don't trust with 90% of companies, so if it becomes standard, we're all be worse off