Why you should immediately cancel all your one-on-one work meetings

On the surface Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, and Jensen Huang, the CEO of computer chip manufacturer Nvidia don’t seem like they’d have much in common.

Chesky co-founded the accommodation sharing platform as a 22-year-old industrial design student when he and his flatmates leased out an air mattress in their living room to strangers. Huang was a 30-year-old electrical engineer who’s built his company into a $5.18 trillion dollar company, constantly tussling with Apple and Microsoft as the world’s most valuable public company.

One-in-one meetings are the most common way we’ve been told we should manage people, however there are a bunch of flaws in their design.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

But despite their contrasting backstories, there is one area in which they are in firm agreement: both Chesky and Huang hate the common trend of recurring one-on-one meetings between managers and their staff, and think you should delete every one in your calendar.

When I used to manage a large team in the media company I co-founded, I had a regular weekly WIP (work-in-progress) with all my direct reports. They usually followed a familiar format, where each employee would bring any problems they were currently facing to the meeting, and together the two of us would dissect them and try to forge a solution together. So far, so normal, right?

One-on-one meetings are the most common way we’ve been told we should manage people, but there are a bunch of flaws in its design. “I don’t believe in one-on-ones,” Chesky told Fortune Magazine, “and almost no great CEO in history has ever done them.”

He believes they don’t work for three main reasons. The first is that the agenda of the meeting is usually owned by the employee, meaning that most of the topics covered are based on only what they want to talk about.

There’s something genuinely wonderful about being able to hear, in real time, how other people process ideas.

The second is, as Chesky puts it, the manager “becomes their therapist”, which can quickly devolve into a laundry list of problems waiting for the manager to solve.

But the biggest flaw is actually hinted at in the title itself. By its very definition, one-on-one meetings involve just two people, and this means that any opportunity for others to learn collectively and problem-solve as a group is lost.

The process of working through ideas inside those meetings is usually not shared with others so that everyone can learn how to solve problems in the most effective way.

The way we learn in a work environment is often by observing other people around us. We learn much from other people and their different ways of thinking, and it helps to create a generalised group way of approaching problems collectively.

There’s something genuinely wonderful about being able to hear, in real time, how other people process ideas, and all that gets lost if it only happens behind closed doors. The solution, according to Chesky, is to hold larger group meetings with all his direct reports at the same time where everyone can collectively workshop their problems together.

Nvidia’s Huang takes this to the extreme. He has a whopping 55 direct reports (which I would not recommend!), so obviously can’t schedule in regular reoccurring meetings with them all.

Instead, he gathers them in group sessions to share things together. “They never hear me say something to them that is only for them to know,” he said. “In that way, our company was designed for agility, for information to flow as quickly as possible.”

There are a couple of caveats, of course. Replacing all your one-on-ones does depend on the quality of the managers and colleagues that you work with, as even a good meeting structure can be overpowered by bad intentions.

There will always be a place for small meetings to discuss topics that are sensitive or require confidentiality, and if you do decide to experiment with this, you also have to ensure that all participants can share their problems and solutions equally.

Challenging the traditional mode of private meetings can be a healthy exercise. When you replace some of your recurring one-on-ones with four-on-ones instead, you’re giving yourself the ability to have four times the brain power to learn from others, solve problems and find better solutions collectively.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

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