As a leader, do you really still have to do one-on-one meetings with each of your direct reports? The answer to this question is, of course, yes. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t have written an entire book about the value of the one-on-one (1:1) meeting. The fact is, there is something special and unique about 1:1s that goes beyond team meetings, an open-door policy and social interactions. You might already be getting heartburn at the thought of having more meetings. But keep in mind that well-executed 1:1s will wind up saving you time by creating better alignment in your team, higher-performing direct reports (directs) and fewer spontaneous interruptions to your workday. They also promote employee engagement, ultimately decreasing turnover.

In the simplest sense, 1:1s refer to a regular and recurring time held between a manager and their directs to discuss topics such as the direct’s well-being, motivation, productivity, roadblocks, priorities, clarity of roles/assignments, alignment with other work activities, goals, coordination with others/the team, employee development and career planning.

Ultimately, 1:1s serve to meet the practical needs of your directs — the support they require to effectively conduct, prioritize and execute their work both in the present moment and over time. But they also address their personal needs, including the inherent need to be treated in a considerate way and the need to feel respected, trusted, supported and valued.

Overall, despite you driving the process to create a dedicated space on the calendar to truly engage with your people individually, for the most part, this is their meeting. You certainly influence what is discussed and the logistics, but the meeting should be dominated by topics of importance to the direct’s needs and concerns. Given this definition, 1:1s are not:

• An emergency meeting to address a problem that has emerged or to put out an unexpected fire.

• A meeting for you to share a to-do list with your direct.

• A meeting to reprimand your direct.

• A meeting for you to just micromanage your direct.

One key question I often get asked is whether a formal performance appraisal meeting counts as a 1:1. Although these meetings are conducted in a 1:1 format, they really are a different type of meeting, whereas 1:1s can elevate and complement an organization’s formal performance appraisal system. In fact, they can be the engine for making a formal performance appraisal system realize its full potential. To better understand this idea, let’s back up and first recognize why formal performance appraisals are needed in organizations.

A formal performance appraisal system, done effectively, accurately documents how your people are doing. This can drive performance improvement while serving to reinforce desired behaviours through recognition of good performance. Moreover, formal assessments can be used to make better, more informed decisions about compensation, promotions and exiting poor performers when necessary.

In the aggregate, performance appraisals give you a sense of your overall talent pool, where you are strong, who your high potentials are, where the bench is weak and if you currently have the talent needed for succession planning. These appraisals can also help you determine training needs (e.g. common deficiencies that can be targeted) and serve as criteria to evaluate organizational practices such as the introduction of a new training system (e.g. did the introduction of Program X lead to increases in the overall performance of your people?).

While there is clearly great promise in having formal performance appraisals, many people — managers and directs alike — complain about them. Here’s why:

• Directs often feel the formal assessment is unfair, unbalanced and weighted with more recent behaviours than cumulative ones.

• They often feel the formal assessment is not timely (e.g. the assessment may cover something that happened six months ago).

• They often feel anxious and stressed when wondering what will happen during the formal assessment meeting and what they will learn.

Managers often dread these meetings as well and worry how people will respond to their feedback. On top of that, it is time-consuming for managers to put together a thoughtful review and to complete all the required documentation, particularly with large spans of control, as they may not recall all that occurred during the evaluation period for their various directs.

One-on-ones to the rescue! Regular 1:1s take the anxiety out of the formal review process because performance issues and strengths have been signalled well in advance. Furthermore, notes from 1:1s serve as an incredibly helpful archive to draw from when creating a formal appraisal. Not only does this make it easier to prepare for the review but it also increases the accuracy of your assessment and your direct’s perceptions of fairness, as keeping meeting notes helps to mitigate the possibility of the review being dominated by things that have happened most recently.

The research is clear: regularly scheduled and successful 1:1s are essential to seven interconnected and important outcomes:

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: The link between 1:1s and employee engagement has been found in a host of contexts and studies. Gallup, for example, studied the engagement levels of 2.5 million manager-led teams around the world. They found that “on average, only 15 per cent of employees who work for a manager who does not meet with them regularly are engaged; managers who regularly meet with their employees almost tripled that level of engagement.”

Relatedly, in a study published in Harvard Business Review, “employees who got little to no one-on-one time with their manager were more likely to be disengaged [while] those who got twice the number of 1:1s with their manager relative to their peers were 67 per cent less likely to be disengaged.” Interestingly, research has not found a plateau effect for 1:1s, whereby too many resulted in employee engagement levelling off or decreasing. In fact, it turns out to be just the opposite. My research generally suggests that overall, there is a positive linear relationship, such that as the number of 1:1s increases, so does employee engagement and positive perceptions of the manager.

TEAM MEMBER SUCCESS: One-on-ones are essential for promoting team member productivity and success. First, they establish a regular cadence of communication to check in on progress, create alignment and ensure that the team member is prioritizing the most critical projects. These meetings allow managers and team members to discuss the direct’s obstacles and roadblocks, engage in real-time decision-making, enhance coordination and provide support and resources when needed. Success is also promoted through ongoing feedback, accountability, support and coaching.

MANAGER SUCCESS: One-on-ones enhance the manager’s success in three ways. First, investing time and energy in regular 1:1s decreases the need for you to answer ad hoc questions, since team members can save those questions for the 1:1 itself. This limits interruptions, increasing your ability to find longer blocks of time to focus on your work. Second, 1:1s serve as a key mechanism for you to acquire needed information, gather feedback and communicate with your team members that better enables you to thrive and drive the team.

Adam Grant summarizes the final way 1:1s promote manager success: “Leaders are judged by what their followers achieve. The higher you climb, the more your success depends on making other people successful.” One-on-ones are clearly about helping others become more successful. This, in turn, extends to team success, which is a reflection of your success as a leader. For example, one study surveyed 1,183 managers and 838 non-managers about 1:1s. The data is striking, with 89 per cent of managers saying that 1:1s positively affected their team’s performance and 73 per cent of employees indicated that 1:1s positively affected their team’s performance.

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS: Getting to know your people and engaging with them on a regular basis is the foundation of building relationships with your team. One-on-ones open the door to this by providing a space to foster connection, to learn about one another and to promote trust. They make relationship building an intentional activity that signals to your directs that they are so important to you that you are willing to schedule a meeting focused on them and their needs. At the same time, if there are problems or tension, regular 1:1s allow you and your directs to clear the air and keep your relationship on track.

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION: Each 1:1 is an opportunity for you to promote — and to truly hear — the voices of your team members. They ensure each team member is not just grouped together with all other directs in the manager’s mind. Instead, they allow each individual’s unique lived experience at work to be better understood and taken into consideration when making decisions and solving problems. As the challenges or issues of each team member are addressed in a genuine and collaborative manner, directs’ ability to thrive and succeed increases — and with this success, your diversity and inclusion goals are more likely to be achieved.

PROMOTING EMPLOYEE GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT: Every 1:1 is an opportunity to help team members grow and develop through honest and actionable feedback, coaching, mentoring and career conversations. Elevating those that work for you is central to being an effective leader. Every 1:1 is an investment in the present and the future of your team members. At the same time, these investments serve to elevate your talent pool, giving you a stronger bench and a greater ability to promote from within. In doing so, you become a more effective manager.

Think about what foregoing 1:1s would convey to your people. As humans, we observe others’ actions (or lack thereof ) and ascribe meaning to them. Unfortunately, as we seek to make sense of what we see or don’t see, research demonstrates that we are subject to a distortion bias known as ‘the fundamental attribution error.’

Here’s an example of this bias at play: A colleague passes you in the hallway but avoids eye contact. Research shows that, most of the time, people would explain this behaviour in dispositional terms and assume their colleague is rude or aloof. These dispositional attributions tend to prevail over more nuanced situational explanations such as assuming that your colleague was distracted by an unexpected deadline or bad news.

Put into the context of 1:1s, what attribution will your people make if you are not having 1:1s and other managers are? Or, what if you are only having 1:1s with a select few directs because you’ve decided they need more time than your other employees? Most likely, you will be inadvertently fostering the impression that you only care about the success of a select few, even if you had the best of intentions in making these decisions.

Yes, 1:1s are a choice. Just remember that our behaviours define us. They signal what is important to us and what our values truly are. That’s why I hope you will agree that 1:1s are an obligation and the embodiment of leadership.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of the Rotman Management magazine. Subscribe to the Rotman Management magazine now for the latest thinking on leadership and innovation.