Founder's Desk
Unless you've had formal training in people management, which most engineering managers haven't, the need for regular one-on-one meetings with direct reports tends to sneak up on you unawares. It's easy to treat them as optional until a resignation letter makes clear they weren't.
Why this sneaks up on new managers
The need for regular 1:1s tends to sneak up on new managers, because most of them were never on the receiving end of good ones. A long stretch of individual contributor years with managers who only checked in when something was already going wrong teaches you, by omission, that this is normal. It isn't, and the absence is more costly than it looks from the outside.
A good 1:1 isn't a status update. Project updates have their own channels: standups, tickets, sprint reviews. A 1:1 exists for the things that don't fit anywhere else: career direction, compensation concerns, friction with a teammate, quiet dissatisfaction that hasn't yet become a resignation letter.
That means the agenda should mostly come from the report, not the manager. If you show up every week with your own list of things to check on, you've turned the one venue meant for their concerns into another status meeting with your name on it.
The manager's job is rarely to solve it
Cancelling or repeatedly rescheduling 1:1s sends a message whether you intend it or not: that this is the first thing to go when the calendar gets tight. Reports notice, and the ones with something genuinely important to raise learn to wait for a more "convenient" moment that may not come for months.
Protecting the time, not just the agenda
A common instinct, especially for managers who were recently strong individual contributors, is to treat every concern raised in a 1:1 as a problem to solve on the spot. Often the more useful move is to ask questions that help the person think through it themselves, and only step in directly when the issue genuinely requires your authority or resources to resolve.
This isn't about withholding help. It's that a report who leaves every 1:1 with your answer never builds the judgment to solve the next version of the same problem alone, and a manager who tries to solve everything personally quickly runs out of hours in the week.
A quick way to check if yours are working
If you're not sure whether your current 1:1s are working, ask the report directly what they'd want more or less of. The answer is usually immediate and specific, and it's a far better guide than any generic template.
