Making the Most of One-on-Ones With Your Manager

It’s your time—own it and use it.

A one-on-one is one of the few meetings specifically intended to be useful to you, so it is worth arriving with more than a weather update. Used well, it creates space for feedback, context and the conversations that are too important to squeeze into Slack.

A useful one-to-one belongs primarily to the person with less organisational power. It needs enough continuity for patterns to emerge and enough trust for the important subject to arrive before the final two minutes.

This matters because small choices repeat. What feels harmless once can quietly become the normal way of working.

Make the work easier to do well

The leadership part is rarely the grand speech. It is the ordinary environment around the work: whether people can ask an awkward question, whether priorities stay still long enough to act on them, and whether useful effort is noticed.

My practical test is simple: after a conversation, does the other person have more clarity and more agency? Good leadership should not make the leader look essential. It should help the team make sound decisions without waiting for permission at every turn.

Leadership is not having every answer. It is making better answers possible.

Trust is built in small, repeatable moments. Say what matters, make space for challenge, and follow through when somebody takes the risk of being honest.

There will always be exceptions. The trick is to make them deliberate exceptions rather than habits nobody remembers choosing.