The One-on-One

Any developer worth hiring will tell you that the best meeting is the meeting that doesn't happen. Some will even be so kind as to tell you that at the beginning of every meeting they're invited to!

The one meeting that I always get value from, however, is the one-on-one. Whether or not I'm having the meeting with my manager or someone on my team I'll always come away with something that made the time invested worth while..

The one-on-one is a meeting where there may be venting, there may be difficult conversations, there may be awkward silence, but the manager's job isn't to be defensive or aggressive, it's to play the part of a good listener. If there is a slip up then the trust will be damaged, if not broken entirely, and will take a long time to repair. This isn't the trust that's related to integrity, such as failing to meet a promised deadline, but the "I won't tell you that I'm unhappy with what's going on and I'm looking for new jobs on Monster.com when you're not around" kind.

Although work status will frequently come up during the one-on-one I make it a point to never explicitly put it on the agenda. I want the meeting to be about the status of Fred, not the status of  Fred's work, which means the first question I always lead with is "How are you doing?". I'll also ask some variant of "what's getting in your way and what's on your mind?", which has a subtle, but key, distinction from being work status related as this could lead beyond a discussion of the issue that he's blocked on and into one about how he'd really like to get two days off to help his girlfriend move but he's not sure about taking it because of the amount of work that's piling up. Their response to that question leads quite naturally into "what can I do to help you?"

I've never encountered a programmer that has said "I really like that this meeting was booked in the middle of the afternoon, I really didn't need to be concentrating on finding that one rare concurrency bug." I could be wrong.


The team is being paid to do good work, and I'm being paid to shelter them from BS, so in order to shelter them from BS and allow them to do good work I try to keep meetings to a minimum and preferably at the periphery of the day. Putting a meeting in the middle of the day kills what your team members are working on, causing them to take a while to get back up to speed once it has concluded. I try to put my one-on-ones at the beginning or end of a solid work block, such as the beginning of their (not your!) day, and either before or after lunch, typically avoiding the end of the day because the end of the day can vary with whatever is going on. A good read on this topic is Paul Graham's essay, Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule.