Millions of one-on-one business meetings take place daily around the world. About half of them don’t achieve the desired results, but you can make sure yours do. Drawing on extensive research, organizational science professor Steven Rogelberg of the University of North Carolina provides concrete advice on setting up, conducting, and following through on one-on-one meetings, mostly between managers and their team members. Rogelberg holds managers responsible for asking the right questions, fostering engagement, and illuminating each person’s progress. He helps managers understand why these sessions matter to their employees and to their own leadership journey.
Take the right approach to maximize your one-on-one meetings.
One-on-one meetings, generally featuring a manager meeting with a direct report, can cover a variety of issues. In most cases, a one-on-one meeting serves the team member’s needs and covers the topics that matter most to that employee. One-on-one sessions should address both participants’ priorities, including goals, problems, roadblocks, productivity, employee development, and any other topics either participant chooses to raise.
Research finds that about a billion business meetings take place daily worldwide. If 20% to 50% of them are one-on-ones, that’s somewhere between 200 and 500 million of these sessions every day. Based on the 200-million-meetings estimate, a low-average wage of $9.37 an hour, and about 20 minutes spent per person per meeting, these one-on-ones could cost a staggering $1.25 billion daily. So one-on-one discussions are common, costly, and potentially quite consequential, but participants say about half of them have “suboptimal” results. Managers often fail to maximize their benefits.
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Steven G. Rogelberg, a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, teaches organizational science, management and psychology. He also wrote The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance. National media, including CBS, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, have profiled his work.
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