Real Shit: Your Team Needs Better 1:1s
A scientific walk through of why 1:1s matter and how to do them right for your team.
Ask yourself:
When was the last time you met with your manager? With your direct reports?
Do you know what or where they want to be in a few years?
Do they know what’s holding them back from hitting the next level?
Do you have a light plan for supporting them to get to that next level?
Do you have a reliable place for them to raise concerns privately?
Do they know what good performance looks like?
Would they be surprised by your current assessment of their performance?
Do you know what is making their job harder?
Do you follow through on the commitments you make to them?
When was the last time you canceled and failed to reschedule?
There’s no judgement. Just give yourself an honest yes/no.
Why Care About This?
A 1:1 is a recurring private conversation between a manager and an employee about how work is going, what support they need, how they are performing, what is getting in their way, and where they want to grow.
It is not a status meeting, a manager monologue, a performance review, or a social visit.
High-quality 1:1s are an evidence-backed, highly relational management practice. When they are done reasonably well, employees are more likely to speak up, seek and learn from feedback, feel supported, remain engaged, and perform better. [1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8]
Not a 1:1 person?
Maybe you walk around and talk to people informally and think that is good enough.
Walking around is useful. Hallway conversations matter.
They are not the same thing as protected time.
Informal access tends to favor whoever is loudest, closest, most comfortable interrupting you, or best connected to the office grapevine. A recurring private conversation gives everyone access, including the quiet expert, the new employee, the remote worker, and the person who does not feel comfortable announcing a problem in front of six other people.
Research on employee silence tells us people weigh the interpersonal cost of speaking before offering bad news, disagreement, or criticism. Psychological safety and the quality of the manager–employee relationship determines whether they speak up. [4, 5, 7, 9]
When employees lack reliable access to individualized conversations with their manager, organizations risk weaker psychological safety, more withheld bad news, poorer feedback, missed development, and weaker manager–employee relationships. [4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
Look, the direct research on 1:1s is still in progress. There are not dozens of experiments across different work domains randomly assigning people to weekly, monthly, or nonexistent meetings. What is published includes an unusually large randomized intervention, a two-wave employee study, and emerging cross-sectional evidence. [1, 2, 3]
The rest of the argument comes from several mature bodies of research that agrees: psychological safety, employee voice, feedback, supervisor support, coaching, listening, and relationship quality.
I don’t have perfect proof of a universal 1:1 formula.
I do have enough evidence to help us take the practice seriously.
The First One
When you first join a team, do a round of 1:1s with everyone.
20-60 minutes per person. One goal: get to know them. No hidden agenda. No surprise performance conversations.
There are location dependent power dynamics, so, let them choose. Where possible provide options for a private, neutral, accessible location.
Let the employee choose between an office, conference room, virtual call, or walk outside. Do not assume walking is comfortable, accessible, private, or culturally preferable.
Make sure you show up!
Then, just talk and listen.
Get curious.
If you need some help here are some starter questions.
How long have you worked here?
What aspects of your job do you like and dislike?
What do you enjoy outside of work?
What do you do for fun?
How’s work going?
What kind of music do you like?
Read any good books lately?
Watched anything good recently?
Favorite flavor of ice cream?
What’s your relationship with your mother like and how does that show up in your trauma patterns and shame responses?
Keep is casual.
Don’t take notes on your first 1:1. But do write down some observations afterwards. Things like:
Favorite snack.
Whether they seem energized or not. (Not to diagnose, but to understand if you just took the helm of an entire team of burnt out zombies who need help asap.)
If you share something in common.
Maybe something you can ask about in the hallway!
e.g. “Hey Chad, how was the fishing trip with the family last weekend?”
The tiny follow ups signal:
I remember what you told me.
Sometimes people are skittish to volunteer information. If you see this being the case, model opening up about your own life and volunteer some information before asking them to do the same.
“I’m new to this role and I’m a bit nervous because I don’t know everything or everyone yet. You seem like you’ve been here a while, how are you liking it? What’s kept you around?”
Vulnerability doesn’t require a dramatic confession. Just some openness and common ground.
The Habit
Frequency
The literature says
1:1s need regularity to maintain continuity.
Quality matters more than frequency.
Focusing on employee needs improves psychological safety.
Exact prescriptions for cadence and duration are unproven!
Twice a year isn’t enough. Once a quarter is pushing it. Depending on the team, once every two months or monthly may be good. Kim Scott recommends weekly in Radical Candor.
In my experience, it depends on the team, the task, and what they need.
It’s about them. Not you.
And there is no one prescription that works.
So, be a scientist and experiment!
Try weekly for a month. Try monthly for a quarter.
Ask your team which they like better.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Agenda
There are a couple schools of thought here.
Some say you should always present an agenda to reduce employee anxiety (I’ll have a sample below).
Others say the 1:1 is for the employee so they need to bring the agenda.
Science says you want a mix. Employee should own the first 2/3, you own 2/9, and the last 1/9 is closing and commitments.
45m 1:1 = (30m employee topics) + (10m manager topics) + (5m wrap-up).
Employee Topics
This is up to them! Just listen. If you need to warm it up here are some questions that dig into how things are going.
Your goal isn’t to ask all of these… it’s to figure out how you can support them.
What is going well?
What’s dragging lately?
Are you stuck anywhere and can I help you get unstuck?
Are there any decisions you need from me to keep your work going?
Do you feel you have clear priorities on what’s important?
Is there anything you have been hesitant to raise that you want to bring up?
What do you think am I not seeing as much lately?
Manager Topics
Your portion could include:
Recognition for specific work or behavior.
Clarification of priorities or expectations, as needed.
Specific, behavior-based feedback, as needed.
Concerns that should be addressed before they become formal problems.
What can I do to support you better?
Is there anything I can do to improve as your manager?
Give kudos liberally, but mean them.
Understand that feedback is not automatically helpful.
The largest known feedback meta-analysis ever showed that more than one third of feedback interventions harmed performance. Feedback is dangerous when it redirects attention away from the task and towards identity defense. [15]
Stay grounded in emphasizing the desired future action. [16]
The credibility, supportiveness, and usefulness of your feedback influences whether it lands for the receiver. [17]
People are more likely to seek feedback if the relationship feels supportive. [18]
If you don’t have their priorities, performance standards, and behavior expectations written down you can’t just give feedback willy-nilly based on your own judgment. You need to have a contract somewhere before you can hold people to it.
Build the system, make the bar known, then coach people to get there.
Hi! I’m Dan. I’m building Kestryl Edge, a company devoted to bringing emotional intelligence to leaders in the workplace.
The Updraft is where I think through content before it goes live. It’s raw, unfiltered, and reflects my thoughts on what makes leaders great.
This is where I think through the literature, chew the fat, and interview great leaders in the community.
My goal is to provide free content that helps people grow. My only ask is you send this to someone who may learn something.
Glad you’re here.
~d 🦅
Water your plants
Here’s a few more and I’d sprinkle these in throughout the year to ensure you’re helping them develop professionally. These are in context of the “What’s your professional goal right now?” north star. If you don’t have that defined, get there first, then ask these.
Is there any work would you like more exposure to?
Where would you want more independence?
Is there an assignment, introduction, or practice opportunity I can provide?
What is your professional goal right now?
What progress do you want to see this year?
You do not need to ask these questions every week.
You do need to ask them often enough that employee development does not appear only during annual reviews, promotion disputes, and resignation conversations.
Coaching research generally finds positive effects, particularly on behavior, but it also finds that simply accumulating more sessions does not guarantee better outcomes. [19, 20]
Quality attention matters more than big calendar blocks.
Closing
End by creating continuity! Write your notes down into a shared document or a response to an ongoing email chain.
WRITE. IT. DOWN.
Make sure they have it.
What did we decide?
Who owns each next step?
What do I owe you?
What do you owe me?
Is there any feedback you’re going to work on between now and next meeting?
Is there any feedback you gave me I’m going to work on?
Do we need to meet again soon to discuss anything important?
Listening matters. Employees who believe their supervisors genuinely listen report less emotional exhaustion, lower intentions to leave, and more voluntary helpful behavior at work. [21]
But employees do not experience listening as a collection of theatrical techniques.
They experience it as a larger package that includes attention, trust, humility, respect, credibility, and follow-through. [22]
All listening without follow through is what rocks do. Literally a boulder. Piece of granite. That’s you dude. You’re a rock.
What a 1:1 is NOT
A 1:1 is not:
A task-list recital.
A substitute for timely feedback.
A disciplinary ambush.
A therapy session.
A place to collect gossip.
A manager monologue.
A weekly demand that the employee prove productivity.
A conversation where every concern immediately becomes an investigation.
A promise that everything said will remain confidential regardless of content.
When things get rough
If you create a space where people feel safe telling the truth, eventually someone will tell you a truth that is heavy.
What do you do when someone is having a crisis in your office?
I don’t have all the answers, but I know this:
As a leader, you are responsible for the safety of your team.
You’re not responsible for a diagnosis, therapy, or determining their ‘stability.’
Your job is to show up human:
Listen. Hard. Attentively. Present. Body facing them. PC screen off.
I try and take a step back and evaluate, are they at risk of harming themselves or others?
I gently ask some questions to figure out if the person has a support network.
Sometimes they just need someone to listen.
Sometimes it is clearly bigger than a bad day. That is when I privately offer whatever resources I know are available.
“Hey, I’ve been through some rough times and when I was scraping by therapy was really helpful for me. Our insurance covers X, here’s some resources, I would support you taking some time out of your work day to support yourself if you thought that would be useful.”
Remember, you’re a coach.
Your players are with you for years. If they have something going on now the best thing you can do is invest in their recovery so they are good to go a year from now, two years from now, etc.
Now, if there’s a safety risk, you have to go all in. Get someone qualified involved.
What I do
I have a couch in my office.
I offer snacks/tea when people come to visit. I keep some ice cream bars in my mini-freezer for when someone gets a well-earned win.
I want people to know they can come in and sit down for a few minutes. That they are welcome.
That they belong.
I have a shared 1:1 meeting minutes and performance document for every employee and I pull that up and add notes whenever we meet.
I have a team of 20+ and aim for monthly 1:1s with most of them. A few experienced employees prefer something closer to quarterly and already have easy access to me between meetings.
It’s never one-size fits all.
My door stays open and I close it for a few hours every day for deep work.
Availability matters to me. Manufacturing demands accessibility.
Boundaries also matter.
It’s a balance.
The same thing, again and again
I’ve been part-of and led leadership teams where we did extensive employee feedback canvassing. Then we sit down for days at a time to figure out how to solve the issues employees raised.
Action plans. RACI matrices. Sticky notes. Categories. Owners. Follow up meetings.
I always wonder when we go down that road:
“Are we going to be honest with ourselves and make changes?”
Every time, bringing the organization a structured expectation for managers to do regular 1:1s with their teams improved the intangible gravity metrics of the org. Trust, psychological safety, openness and transparency. Feelings of being listened to and belonging. Engagement.
Supervisor support shapes whether employees feel valued by the organization. [4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
These things are difficult to place neatly on a dashboard.
They determine whether people tell you the truth.
Whether they ask for help.
Whether they admit mistakes.
Whether they know what you expect.
Whether they stay long enough to become excellent.
You don’t need a perfect template.
Create space and show up.
The Updraft is my archives for management tools, tips, and interviews with other leaders. Always free. Always for the people who are ready to grow.
Stick around. There’s more to come.
References
[1] Castro, Silvia, Florian Englmaier, and Maria Guadalupe. Fostering Psychological Safety in Teams: Evidence from an RCT. CEPR Discussion Paper 20218. Paris and London: CEPR Press, 2025.
Studied more than 500 teams and 4,300 employees observationally and randomized more than 1,000 teams and 7,000 employees, finding that employee-needs-focused manager conversations improved psychological safety, perceived leadership quality, and innovativeness.
[2] Flinchum, Jonathan R. A New Approach to Promote Employee Engagement: One-on-One Meetings Between Managers and Direct Reports. PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2022.
Surveyed 303 employees twice and found that relations-oriented 1:1 quality predicted engagement more strongly than frequency, although the benefits appeared only when meetings occurred at least approximately monthly.
[3] Taguchi, Yoto, Hiroko Kitamura, Yoshiyuki Shibata, Hisashi Eguchi, and Shoko Kawanami. “P-175 A Cross-Sectional Study of the Effects of Regular One-on-One Meetings Between Supervisors and Subordinates in the Workplace.” Occupational Medicine 74, suppl. 1 (2024), abstract P-175. doi:10.1093/occmed/kqae023.0705.
Received 677 responses from 2,376 eligible employees and found that five or more 1:1s per year were associated with greater psychological safety but not clearly better mental health.
[4] Frazier, M. Lance, Stav Fainshmidt, Ryan L. Klinger, Amir Pezeshkan, and Veselina Vracheva. “Psychological Safety: A Meta-Analytic Review and Extension.” Personnel Psychology 70, no. 1 (2017): 113–65. doi:10.1111/peps.12183.
Synthesized 136 samples, more than 22,000 people, and approximately 5,000 groups and found that psychological safety predicted task performance and citizenship behavior beyond engagement and positive leader relationships.
[5] Hao, Leilei, Hui Zhu, Yuqian He, Jinyun Duan, Teng Zhao, and Hui Meng. “When Is Silence Golden? A Meta-Analysis on Antecedents and Outcomes of Employee Silence.” Journal of Business and Psychology 38 (2023): 1025–54. doi:10.1007/s10869-021-09788-7.
Synthesized 168 samples and 63,134 employees and found that silence was associated with poorer attitudes, task performance, and citizenship behavior, while psychological safety strongly influenced whether employees spoke up.
[6] Martin, Robin, Yves Guillaume, Geoff Thomas, Allan Lee, and Olga Epitropaki. “Leader–Member Exchange and Performance: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Personnel Psychology 69, no. 1 (2016): 67–121. doi:10.1111/peps.12100.
Synthesized 146 task-performance samples, 97 citizenship samples, and 19 counterproductive-behavior samples and found that stronger manager–employee relationships predicted better performance and behavior, with trust serving as the strongest mediator.
[7] Dulebohn, James H., William H. Bommer, Robert C. Liden, Robyn L. Brouer, and Gerald R. Ferris. “A Meta-Analysis of Antecedents and Consequences of Leader-Member Exchange: Integrating the Past with an Eye toward the Future.” Journal of Management 38, no. 6 (2012): 1715–59. doi:10.1177/0149206311415280.
Synthesized 247 studies and 290 samples and found that leader behaviors and perceptions explained more variation in manager–employee relationship quality than follower or contextual factors.
[8] Eisenberger, Robert, Florence Stinglhamber, Christian Vandenberghe, Ivan L. Sucharski, and Linda Rhoades. “Perceived Supervisor Support: Contributions to Perceived Organizational Support and Employee Retention.” Journal of Applied Psychology 87, no. 3 (2002): 565–73. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.87.3.565.
Studied 314, 300, and 493 employees across three field studies and found that supervisor support increased employees’ sense that the organization valued them and was associated with lower turnover.
[9] Liu, Shengmin, and Zhenyu Ling. “How Does Authoritarian Leadership and Abusive Supervision Suppress Employee Voice? A Meta-Analysis Based on Cognitive and Resource Perspectives.” Baltic Journal of Management 20 (2025): 248–65. doi:10.1108/BJM-10-2024-0622.
Synthesized 354 articles, 427 effects, and 169,127 participants and found that authoritarian and abusive leadership suppressed employee voice partly by damaging psychological safety and manager–employee relationships.
[10] Allen, Joseph A., Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, and Nicole Landowski. “Linking Pre-Meeting Communication to Meeting Effectiveness.” Journal of Managerial Psychology 29, no. 8 (2014): 1064–81. doi:10.1108/JMP-09-2012-0265.
Surveyed 252 working adults and found that pre-meeting small talk predicted perceived meeting effectiveness beyond the contribution of effective meeting procedures.
[11] Luong, Alexandra, and Steven G. Rogelberg. “Meetings and More Meetings: The Relationship between Meeting Load and the Daily Well-Being of Employees.” Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 9, no. 1 (2005): 58–67. doi:10.1037/1089-2699.9.1.58.
Tracked employees for five workdays in a daily-diary study and found that attending more meetings predicted greater daily fatigue and subjective workload; the participant total was not reported in the available abstract.
[12] Scott, Kim. Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. Fully revised and updated ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019.
Practitioner book with no empirical sample that presents the “Care Personally, Challenge Directly” framework and recommends weekly 1:1s as a recurring space for candor, feedback, and relationship maintenance.
[13] Hosseinkashi, Yasaman, Lev Tankelevitch, Jamie Pool, Ross Cutler, and Chinmaya Madan. “Meeting Effectiveness and Inclusiveness: Large-Scale Measurement, Identification of Key Features, and Prediction in Real-World Remote Meetings.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 8, CSCW1 (2024): article 93, 1–39. doi:10.1145/3637370.
Analyzed 7,417 meeting survey responses across five organizations and found that participation strongly predicted inclusiveness and effectiveness, while calendar and telemetry data could not fully capture participants’ experiences.
[14] Allen, Joseph A., Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, and Stephanie J. Sands. “Meetings as a Positive Boost? How and When Meeting Satisfaction Impacts Employee Empowerment.” Journal of Business Research 69, no. 10 (2016): 4340–47. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.04.011.
Surveyed 248 working adults and retained 148 at follow-up, finding that meeting satisfaction predicted later psychological empowerment partly by improving information availability.
[15] Kluger, Avraham N., and Angelo DeNisi. “The Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance: A Historical Review, a Meta-Analysis, and a Preliminary Feedback Intervention Theory.” Psychological Bulletin 119, no. 2 (1996): 254–84. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254.
Synthesized 607 effects and 23,663 observations and found that feedback improved performance on average but reduced it in more than one-third of cases, especially when attention shifted from the task toward the recipient’s identity.
[16] Gnepp, Jackie, Joshua Klayman, Ian O. Williamson, and Sema Barlas. “The Future of Feedback: Motivating Performance Improvement through Future-Focused Feedback.” PLOS ONE 15, no. 6 (2020): e0234444. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0234444.
Studied 924 managers, executives, and MBA students across three studies and found that future-focused feedback better predicted acceptance and intentions to improve than arguments over past performance.
[17] Zyberaj, Jetmir. “Examining the Relationship between Supervisory Feedback Characteristics and Employee Feedback Processing: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Current Psychology (2026). doi:10.1007/s12144-026-09323-y.
Synthesized 24 studies and 595,950 participants and found that feedback credibility, quality, supportiveness, valence, and source characteristics influenced whether employees perceived, accepted, and used feedback.
[18] Anseel, Frederik, Adam S. Beatty, Winny Shen, Filip Lievens, and Paul R. Sackett. “How Are We Doing after 30 Years? A Meta-Analytic Review of the Antecedents and Outcomes of Feedback-Seeking Behavior.” Journal of Management 41, no. 1 (2015): 318–48. doi:10.1177/0149206313484521.
Meta-analyzed thirty years of feedback-seeking research and found that transformational leadership and high-quality relationships encouraged feedback seeking, while its average relationship with performance was small.
[19] Nicolau, Andreea, Octav Sorin Candel, Ticu Constantin, and Ad Kleingeld. “The Effects of Executive Coaching on Behaviors, Attitudes, and Personal Characteristics: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Control Trial Studies.” Frontiers in Psychology 14 (2023): 1089797. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1089797.
Synthesized 20 randomized studies and found that executive coaching produced positive effects, particularly on behavior, while the number of sessions did not significantly predict outcomes.
[20] Cannon-Bowers, Janis A., Clint A. Bowers, Catherine E. Carlson, Shannon L. Doherty, Jocelyne Evans, and Julie Hall. “Workplace Coaching: A Meta-Analysis and Recommendations for Advancing the Science of Coaching.” Frontiers in Psychology 14 (2023): 1204166. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1204166.
Synthesized 11 workplace-coaching studies and found a moderate positive effect, with no clear advantage for face-to-face delivery or for accumulating more sessions or coaching hours.
[21] Lloyd, Karina J., Diana Boer, Joshua W. Keller, and Sven Voelpel. “Is My Boss Really Listening to Me? The Impact of Perceived Supervisor Listening on Emotional Exhaustion, Turnover Intention, and Organizational Citizenship Behavior.” Journal of Business Ethics 130, no. 3 (2015): 509–24. doi:10.1007/s10551-014-2242-4.
Studied 43 employees working under 18 managers and a second sample of 328 employees and found that perceived supervisor listening predicted less exhaustion and turnover intention and more voluntary helpful behavior.
[22] Borut, Limor, Avraham N. Kluger, Harry T. Reis, and Debra L. Shapiro. “How, If at All, Do Perceptions of Supervisor’s Listening Differ from General Relationship Quality? Psychometric Analysis.” Journal of Business and Psychology 40 (2025): 285–314. doi:10.1007/s10869-024-09938-7.
Surveyed 2,038 subordinates and found that perceived supervisor listening overlapped heavily with trust, humility, support, rudeness, and the broader quality of the manager–employee relationship.
Um, what do you mean that "employees do not experience listening as a collection of theatrical techniques" ?!? Has my Hamilton-original-marketing-team-cred meant NOTHING to you?!
In all seriousness, I loved the entirety of this piece. I was speaking to a SVP today at a massive banking brand who flagged that even their quarterly reviews don't feel like enough to mitigate and prevent burnout. He felt like the diagnostic tools that exist are offering the "why" but not the "how" -- I think you've built a great guide here to the latter! (And you know how I feel about building accurate diagnostic tools...!)
What're your thoughts on skip-level meetings?