On 2016-07-08, at 16:14 , Mark McCullough <mmc...@professional-paranoid.guru> wrote:
Having experienced mostly good situations with weekly 1-1s, I think the point is being missed of why those meetings exist. If you’re a fairly competent person, your boss isn’t sitting in meetings with you. They are off doing tasks of their own, such as budgeting, arranging priorities of your team compared to other team priorities. They have a hard time knowing what you’re working on. You are likely to not know the efforts of other teams that could impact you. The 1-1 meeting is to provide two way communication of those things. Make sure your manager knows how things are going from your end, even what you’re working on. Also to inform you of anything coming from on above that might influence those things you are working on. At most places I’ve worked, a scheduled communication time, a 1-1 meeting, was the only time one could reliably find one’s manager to get their take on some issue. Good 1-1 meetings were planned for 30 minutes, often only running 15 minutes. I agree with the earlier comment that they should not be entirely work focused. Part of the point of the meeting is to maintain enough comfort of communication that the people involved feel comfortable bringing topics up. That cannot happen if they aren’t open to non-work discussions. They should also be open to griping. Sometimes, a person needs to just gripe about a coworker. The manager needs to permit that without making a capital case of each gripe. It could be clashing personalities, or it could be the warning signs of a case where the manager needs to step in directly. The very idea of trying to mandate "going to lunch" with your manager or team makes several mistakes. You aren’t likely to eat at the same time as the rest of your team. Telling someone who usually eats at 10:45 to wait until 12:30 to eat isn’t going to make friends. Telling the person who doesn’t usually eat before 13:30, and often later, to eat at 11:15 won’t make them happy either. If you are meeting, you are working, it isn’t personal time, and thus is a meeting, be it a group meeting, where concerns about members of the team cannot be safely raised, or a 1-1 meeting which is being criticized by some. Your team is not likely to be in the same office, city, state (and in some cases, country) as you. Never let an employer make you fall into the trap of taking unpaid working lunches. Either don’t take a lunch break at all, or take a real break where you are not working and no one can tell you where to go, who to spend time with. The anti-meeting culture I see here is based around the myth that coordination of effort isn’t work. Yes, some meetings are very inefficiently run. Some are better served by a single blast email. But I’ve worked so many meetings where it was the most efficient way for three or more people to get a task done. When I’m trying to collect information to document a security risk, I need input from multiple teams. I can do that via email and waste many hours of everyone’s time as each person responds with tiny pieces of the puzzle, or I can get everyone together for thirty minutes, get the story straight, and head off misinformation. (I’ve literally watched well over 40 person-hours spent in email discussion when a single 30 minute meeting with four people was all it took to solve the problem. If you’re so busy that you can’t take 15 minutes to talk once a week, then you have a bigger problem that the boss needs to know. > On 2016-07-08, at 14:56 , Tracy Reed <tr...@ultraviolet.org> wrote: > > On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 10:36:57AM PDT, Peter Loron spake thusly: >> I’ve never found 1-1 meetings to be very useful for me. If I am not on track >> or am failing somehow, come grab me immediately and let me know. If I’m >> kicking ass, come grab me and let me know. Other than that, stay out of my >> hair and let me get stuff done. No reason to schedule anything. If there’s a >> reason to talk, then do it immediately. If there’s no reason, then don’t >> waste my time. > > This is exactly right. I've never seen a one-on-one meeting schedule that was > regularly upheld anyway. They are always postponed or put off as being less > important and eventually we stop having them. I've never seen it last more > than > 4 months. > > You know what I like? Regularly having lunch with the team. And with the boss. > Any issues can be talked about promptly. It should never wait until the weekly > or monthly one on one. > > So many managers just don't know how to manage. Not saying that I do, but just > having meetings isn't necessarily progress. Meeting is often the opposite of > working. > > -- > Tracy Reed > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss@lists.lopsa.org > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ ---- "The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue." Edward R Murrow (1964) Mark McCullough mark.mc...@gmail.com
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