Are 1:1 with your direct reports outdated?

About a time-consuming ritual with limited impact.

A CEO I worked with, recognising how much time was taken by regular 1:1 decided to stop them all. At once. What a relief for his agenda! And what a push-back from his team! How will we align together? How will I discuss critical decision points with you? He did so about 10 years and has never regretted it.

Interestingly enough, Ron Carucci, cofounder and managing partner at Navalent, is arguing exactly this point in his recent Harvard Business Review article: “Why senior leaders should stop having so many one-on-ones” (link in the first comment below).

“In most large organisations, a typical CEO’s calendar is clogged with 1:1 meetings. They are usually seen as necessary for alignment (…) but the very structure of those meetings is working against the organisation’s best interests”.

Why? The most common pitfall I have seen is the clash of vertical alignment (CEO to direct report) vs. horizontal alignment (direct reports to direct reports). You have just agreed on a decision during a Leadership team meeting, to learn that one of your peers went to the CEO to negotiate an alternative solution, 1:1. And you feel betrayed; you were not involved in this new decision.

Ron calls this “Executive rivalry and collusion”: “1:1 become arenas for inside influence, where leaders can imply advantage by referencing private access (“In my 1:1 with Bill this morning…), creating a sense of secrecy and status that erodes collective trust.” Indeed, cutting deals one-on-one with the boss, doesn’t reinforce collective trust and collaboration.

Those 1:1 reinforce the position of the CEO as a bottleneck, the ones people go for taking decisions, weakening the network of cross-functional decision makers. “1:1 reinforce a view of the organisation as a set of departments rather than a web of capabilities. This strengthens silos instead of creating cross-functional coherence”.

So, where do decisions should get taken? Ideally, during your Leadership team meetings, particularly if they have been well prepared in advance, i.e. topics have discussed, debated and aligned horizontally between all functions affected. Additionally, Ron recommends creating what he calls “Capability councils”.

What sounds like a heavy system, is simply a set of 1:2 or 1:3 around core organisational capabilities like “innovation”, “digital transformation”, or “customer loyalty”, with cross-functional representation. “These councils become the forums for near-term decision-making (…) saving the full executive teams’ time for truly enterprise-wide strategies”.

The times for 1:1 (not only at the CEO level) are gone. Change is too fast, teams too broad and time too limited to capture such a chunk of a leader’s time. Agility looks different than a large series of pre-set meetings.

Which practices have you seen leaders adopting to address this issue?