The Leader Lab

11Effective One-on-Ones

Imagine you are halfway through your workday and feeling unproductive. Somehow your to-do list has only grown since the morning. You glance at your calendar and notice that you have a one-on-one coming up with a team member. There's nothing urgent to discuss, and you just met yesterday to give input on their work. Your cursor hovers over the cancel button. Should you hit it? Based on our research, the answer is no. By the end of this chapter, we hope you will agree and go into your next one-on-one more confident about how to put this time to great use.

Why dedicate an entire chapter to leading effective one-on-ones? So far, we've shared three tipping point skills that differentiate great managers from average: coaching, feedback, and productivity. These skills are the “how.” But rarely is a “how” useful without a “where.” To put these skills into practice, the highest leverage “where” is the humble one-on-one. While it seems like a meager 30- or 60-minute calendar block, consistent one-on-ones are a manager's single greatest resource. For these meetings to be effective, they have to be frequent. In fact, monthly one-on-ones actually lead to less engagement than having no one-on-ones at all (Clifton and Harter 2019). And regularly scheduled one-on-ones predict better engagement and performance (Mann and Darby 2014). How does the one-on-one do all this? Here are the top three reasons:

1. Trust via the mere-exposure effect: Simply seeing one another's faces ...