Why You Should Stop Turning 1:1s into Weekly Status Meetings

Many meetings are just live versions of an email that should have been sent yesterday.

We’ve all sat through them. Your manager walks in, opens a notebook, and starts reading through their list. They tell you what’s on track, what’s delayed, and who they’re waiting on. It feels like you’re accomplishing something. It feels like you’re staying in the loop.

But in reality, you’re just paying your leader to read you a status report.

If you spend your 1:1s catching up on what happened, you never have time to discuss how it happened, why certain decisions were made, and how you’re actually supporting your people. Instead, you end up consuming information instead of acting strategically.

The most expensive use of a senior leader’s time is a face-to-face hour spent collecting data they could have read in five minutes.

When you treat your 1:1s as status updates, you’re training your managers that their job is to observe the business, not to direct it. You teach them that as long as they keep you informed, they’ve done their job.

Instead of hearing about the project timeline, you should be hearing about the trade-offs they made to keep it on track. Instead of hearing who is frustrated, you should be hearing how they handled the conflict before it reached your desk.

You aren't looking for a list of accomplishments. You’re looking for evidence that they’re thinking at the altitude you hired them for.

Leadership isn't about being the most informed person in the building. It’s about ensuring that the people who report to you are the ones making the right calls so you don't have to.

If your calendar is full of live status reports, you’re leading a status report process.

This week, try a different move. When a 1:1 starts to sound like a report, stop the status report. Ask about the decisions. Ask about the tradeoffs. Ask about the gaps.