1-on-1s: Essential or Overrated?

At their best, they keep entire organizations aligned, motivated and supported. At least, that’s the theory.

At the time of writing, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has 40 direct reports and famously conducts no 1-on-1s, preferring group settings for all live conversation. Nvidia is wildly successful and boasts great scores on sites like GlassDoor. So is Huang’s approach the exception that proves the rule? What dark sorcery is at work here and what might we learn?

Convention Over Configuration

When experts say “1-on-1s are essential”, what they hopefully mean to imply is…

“If you’re trying to achieve a bunch of very common, important goals in your business, given that you have a ‘typical’ mix of people, roles, processes and cultural conventions, 1-on-1s are a reliably high-success-rate tool for achieving those goals.”

This is the ‘everything has tradeoffs’ mindset that recognizes no initiative / tool lives in isolation. Just because 1-on-1s happen to be the best tool in many circumstances, doesn’t mean they’re the only approach that can / should work. However in order to chart a different path, we need to unpack the things 1-on-1s deliver and how we might achieve those things using different tools.

Outcomes Over Activity

When we teach teams how to have effective 1-on-1s, we identify a number of outcomes that such meetings could theoretically achieve. Broadly, these break down into 3 groups…

• Personal Connection: The fostering of mutual trust, respect, understanding and perhaps even fondness. This is the lifeblood of an organization that needs to face challenges together because people draw on such connections when things get tough.
• Growth Support: Every individual has a different sense of what self-actualization means to them. Tuning the support they get accordingly is vital to both their development and their retention within the organization.
• Driving Delivery: Giving advice, solving problems, making decisions and gathering status are all activities that are commonly practiced in 1-on-1s to keep things moving.

Nothing listed here is exclusively dependent on the 1-on-1 format. In fact, we would even argue that a few of the items contained in the buckets above are poor uses of 1-on-1 time. Regardless, the three questions any leader who’d like to try Nvidia’s model should ask themselves are…

• “What set of rituals, artifacts and roles will we need if we want to achieve these outcomes without 1-on-1s?”
• “What will it cost to build and maintain that entire alternative team architecture?”
• “What new risks will be created?”

Risky Business

If we look at some publicly available critical sentiments from Nvidia employees, they talk about having to be in a lot of meetings. Any set of conventions that favors group settings for discussions carries the risk of creating a meeting heavy culture. One of the things 1-on-1s do (and, indeed, can overdo) is provide compartmentalization for discussions, keeping them relevant to the people involved. Moving away from 1-on-1s means having to be very deliberate about curating and facilitating discussions to keep things tight and focused.

Another obvious challenge with Huang’s approach is that it selects very strongly for certain kinds of temperament; interactive learners with a speak-think-speak bias. By contrast, some people don’t do well in even moderately sized group meetings and tend to be at their best 1-on-1 for certain kinds of conversation. There’s no rule that says you have to have those kinds of people in your organization but if you create norms that exclude such people, you are taking a bet on being able to thrive without them. This is another example of a tradeoff that must be undertaken deliberately and thoughtfully.

Finally, we have a benefit of 1-on-1s that is (hopefully) rarely needed but occasionally indispensable; a personal safety net. When someone is struggling in ways they don’t feel able to talk about in a group setting, an organizational bias against 1-on-1s can make them less apt to reach out for help. This can be true even if managers have made it clear their door is open in such circumstances. “1-on-1s are inefficient” can quickly turn into “only inefficient people want a 1-on-1” in the team’s list of cultural assumptions.

The Bottom Line

Given everything discussed, we default to recommending regular, effectively designed and delivered 1-on-1s for most organizations. You’ll need to reflect on the questions above to decide whether they are the best tool for your organization. If you’d like to dive a little deeper into the tradeoffs and options, we’d be happy to talk with you further.