Meetings that run over are costing you roughly five hours and $2,000 every single month, and three simple shifts can fix that. Lia walks through the agenda, the parking lot, and the end-of-meeting timer as a repeatable system to end on time, every time. This episode is most useful for owners, founders, and team leads who want to reclaim time without overhauling how their team works.
This episode is part of the 1:1s, Meetings & Time Management series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…when we don’t make time to meet with our team members, we’re saying, I’m prioritizing everything else than having this meeting with you.”
“…it doesn’t matter if you spend every single minute of the day in meetings with a team member, it doesn’t take the place of having a one-on-one meeting…”
“…don’t wait till your team member comes to you with a problem. Because again, not everybody’s going to feel comfortable doing that.”
“Save the status updates for emails and for the project tool tracking, whatever you got.”
Episode highlights
What you are actually losing when you skip 1:1s
When you are not meeting with team members individually, you lose visibility into what is really going on. Project trackers show task status. Team meetings show deliverables. Neither shows you that someone is burning out, feels undervalued, or is quietly spinning their wheels on a problem that was already solved. Lia is direct: not making time sends a message, even when it is unintentional. You are telling that person that everything else is a higher priority than they are.
The team members most at risk are not the squeaky wheels. They are the ones who do not want to bother you, do not want to rock the boat, or do not want to draw attention to themselves. Without a standing meeting, those people never surface what they need, and that silence eventually costs you either their output or their tenure.
The engineer who worked all evening rather than ask a question
Lia shares a story about a mentee, a female engineer on a male-dominated team, who was getting stuck regularly but refused to ask for help. Instead of raising her hand, she would work late every night trying to figure things out alone. The result was burnout and serious doubt about whether she had made the right career move.
The problems she was stuck on? Simple team-specific nuances. Things a five-minute conversation with her manager would have resolved. A regular 1:1 would have been the exact container for her to surface those questions without feeling like she was making a big deal out of it. This is the real cost of skipping 1:1s: hours of wasted effort and an employee who starts wondering if she belongs.
Seeing someone every day is not the same as having a 1:1
Lia pushes back on a common objection she hears from leaders, especially those at agencies or in collaborative environments: “I am in meetings with this person constantly, so a 1:1 feels redundant.”
It is not the same. Group meetings are for project status. You already know the project status. The 1:1 is the only space where you can ask about career goals, give direct coaching, celebrate wins, and hear what is not being said. Those conversations do not happen naturally in team settings. You have to create the container for them.
How often to meet (and the floor Lia will not go below)
For most teams, Lia recommends weekly or biweekly. Every three weeks is acceptable if your team is large. Monthly is the line she will not endorse, and every six or eight weeks is not a 1:1 cadence, it is a checkbox. You cannot build a real working relationship with someone you talk to once every two months.
If time is the obstacle, the solution is not to cancel the meeting. The solution is to shorten it.
Run your 1:1 in 10 to 15 minutes with a clear agenda
1:1s do not need to be an hour. They do not even need to be 30 minutes. What they do need is a repeatable structure so your team member comes prepared every single time.
Two frameworks Lia recommends:
– Roses, Buds, Thorns: one thing going well, one thing emerging or coming up, one thing that is not going well. – Highlight and lowlight: one win plus one place they are stuck.
Keep a shared running document where both of you can drop questions and topics throughout the week. When the meeting starts, you jump straight in. No warm-up needed.
The goal is a coaching conversation and a recognition conversation, not a status update. Status updates belong in email and your project tracking tool.
What changes when you actually do the 1:1s
Regular 1:1s let you catch small problems before they become expensive ones. You start to recognize what a team member looks like when they are stressed versus when they are thriving. You can assign stretch projects with confidence because you understand how they work. You can celebrate wins in a way that actually lands, which builds the resilience your team needs when the work gets hard.
The bottom line: teams with consistent 1:1s run more efficiently, and the leader spends less time firefighting. Put it on the calendar, protect it, and if you have to cancel occasionally, that is fine. What you cannot do is let weeks pile up without that touchpoint.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 182: Still drowning in meetings? How to reclaim 5 or more hours every week as a manager. Most managers lose hours every week because they hold on tighter when they should be letting go. Lia walks through four concrete strategies, from stepping out of meetings and delegating with context to managing your own stress signals and naming the real cut line on your priority list. This episode is most useful for managers who feel perpetually behind and are unknowingly passing that stress straight down to their teams.
- Ep 159: Why your to-do list never gets done (and how to fix it with smarter calendar design). The real reason your week feels like a hamster wheel is context switching, not a lack of effort. Lia walks through three practical calendar moves, grouping similar meetings, planning your week in advance, and color-coding by context, that dramatically cut the mental cost of jumping between tasks. This episode is especially useful for leaders who feel perpetually behind despite working hard.
- Ep 127: How to save 5 to 10 hours a week as a leader (without burning out your team). Leaders lose hours every week to bloated meetings, manual processes, and context they never hand off. Lia walks through a repeatable system, calendar audits, meeting hygiene, process simplification, and intentional delegation, that can reclaim 5 to 10 hours a week for you and up to 30 to 40 hours a month across your team. This episode is especially useful for founders and corporate leaders whose teams have started to notice the overwhelm before they did.
- Ep 76: How to optimize your meetings and save $2,000 a month. Meetings that run over are costing you roughly five hours and $2,000 every single month, and three simple shifts can fix that. Lia walks through the agenda, the parking lot, and the end-of-meeting timer as a repeatable system to end on time, every time. This episode is most useful for owners, founders, and team leads who want to reclaim time without overhauling how their team works.
Want to go deeper?
The New Manager Playbook. Lia’s bestselling guide to leading a team for the first time.
Full transcript (click to expand)
So in a world where we don’t meet with our team members frequently, it prevents you from having a relationship because, well, how else are you going to build a relationship with someone than by connecting with them on a more personal level, on a more regular basis? And really by not having regular touch points, we’re losing an opportunity to get to know our team members. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant.
Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or a seasoned manager ready to up their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple.
From conflicts, to feedback, to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Today we are talking all about one-on-one meetings, and these are the meetings that you have with your individual team members, you and them, just the two of you, and these are critically important. So TLDR, like the first thing to know is, do we need to have one-on-one meetings?
The answer is yes. Okay. So now the whole conversation today, I’m going to talk about why we need them, what happens if we don’t have them, and really how to utilize the time most effectively. So now that we got out of the way, do you need to have one-on-ones? Well, let’s talk about why. So in a world where we don’t meet with our team members frequently, what kind of things can start to happen? Well, first off, we don’t really have a sense of what’s going on with that person internally, within themselves.
Like, yes, we might see their work status moving through whatever tracking system we’re using. We might see that, you know, in meetings that we’re both in, they’re like running stuff, they’re in good shape and things seem to be going well. But without meeting that person individually and having regular touchpoint, we don’t really know what’s going on internally. And what I mean by internally could be if they’re really struggling with something going on outside of work that’s affecting their work.
We don’t know if they feel like this project they’re working on is really not motivating or they feel like they’re really, you know, they could use a little bit of support, coaching, mentorship, a little bit of help. And we don’t really know that because maybe they’re figuring it out and piecing it together, but maybe it’s taking a lot more energy than it has to be. We don’t know if someone’s a flight risk to leave our team because we’re not checking in with them a lot.
Right? So, you know, we’re sending a signal that we don’t really value them and it may be totally unintentional, but when we don’t make time to meet with our team members, we’re saying, I’m prioritizing everything else than having this meeting with you. So it can really chip away at having a relationship or should I say it prevents you from having a relationship? Because, well, how else are you going to build a relationship with someone than, than by connecting with them on a more personal level, on a more regular basis?
And really by not having regular touch points, we’re, we’re losing this opportunity to build that relationship. We’re losing an opportunity to get to know our team members and we’re relying on them to come forward when something comes up. And some team members do that. Some folks are really proactive. Some folks have come to us a little too often, maybe, but there’s a lot of people out there that are worried that they’re bothering you or they don’t want to rock the boat or they don’t want to cause too much kind of focus on themselves.
And these are the ones that we can, you know, that, that fly under the radar. And these are the situations where a lot can start to go wrong on our team or with this person when, when we don’t have that form in place to check in. And, you know, where does this start to really cause, you know, stickiness and productivity and efficiency and really start costing you time and money is if someone’s feeling stuck and they’re just muscling through it.
A lot of times they’re, you know, maybe spending a lot of time where they’re not actually making any progress on something. A few years ago I was coaching an engineer and she was sharing that, you know, she was new on the team and she didn’t want to come across like she didn’t know what she was doing. She was already, you know, one of the only women on the team and she was really proud to be there and, and, you know, didn’t want to raise any flags by having questions.
So instead of asking questions, she would work all evening trying to figure things out. Like if she felt stuck, she said, I’m going to figure this out by myself. And this was costing her so much of her own personal time. It started to lead her to feel burned out. Like did she pick the wrong team and the wrong role? And we, you know, we talked about, well, is there a way that you can actually, you know, position, Hey, I want to learn this thing I’d love to learn from your shadow.
Like how can she position asking for support in a way that she’s comfortable with? Right. And, and as she started to do that and build a muscle around that, she started to see that a lot of the stuff she was getting stuck on were just little things that were nuances about that particular team. Of course it had nothing to do with her skillset or if she was a good engineer or not, or she should have been on the team or not.
No, it was really stuff that, you know, folks needed to show her. And if she had asked or had that connection with her manager, that would have been the opportunity to say, Hey, I’m noticing this thing’s taking a little longer than I know it should. And I’d love to kind of figure out, can I be paired up with someone or is there a tool that you’re using for this or workflow that I can be adopting into my work so that I’m not getting stuck?
Okay. But we don’t know if we haven’t talked to our team members, if they’re getting stuck. And this example was a big wake up call for me that, Hey, managers, we gotta be checking in with folks because if someone, again, you know, that was in a corporate salary position, if someone was working for you hourly and they are clocking in hours where they’re just spinning their wheels and solving problems that have already been solved, where there’s a really easy solution for, well, that’s not a good use of folks’ time.
Okay. So that’s why we have one-on-ones. As a business owner, when I have a lot on my mind, there is nothing more helpful than having a checklist and nothing more gratifying than crossing things off that list. And as the leader of your team and company, it might feel like the list of things you have to remember to do to be a good manager gets longer every day. That’s why I created my thriving team checklist, including 10 things you can do this week and every week to show up better for your team.
Get in the rhythm of completing these things every week. And you will find that not only is your team performing better, your job is getting easier in the process. It’s the ultimate win-win. Grab your copy today at leahgarvin.com slash checklist. Now I want to talk about, well, I get questions like, well, what frequency should I have one-on-ones? And it may not be feasible to do a one-on-one conversation with every team member every single month. Maybe you have, you know, five, six, seven, 10 team members and it’s, you know, you would be spending two days a week fully in one-on-ones if you’re having them.
Then maybe, you know, a biweekly sort of cadence makes sense. I would caution from doing monthly. I’ve seen folks with really large teams do one-on-one every other month. Literally like that’s not the point is to kind of, that sort of feels like a checkbox where you have this meeting, it’s like, Hey, you know, let me know. Because how can you build a relationship when you’re talking to someone every, you know, eight weeks? I don’t know. It doesn’t work for me.
So if you’ve got a system that works for you, cool. But I would suggest trying to do it at least, you know, every other week, maybe every three weeks, but having a regular touch point where you can start to build that rapport, you start to get a sense of what’s not being said. Okay. The way, like when someone’s feeling stressed, what are some of the behaviors they display? When they’re feeling overwhelmed, you have an opportunity to check in about wins and celebrate what they’re doing great and highlight it.
And you know, if we don’t meet with them very regularly, we don’t have a way to know that. And recently I was having a meeting with a management team and a marketing agency and they were talking about, well, you know, we have a lot of team members that I’m in meetings with this person like every day. So it doesn’t really feel like a weekly one-on-one makes sense. And what I cautioned that manager was from sort of conflating seeing your team members from actually having these one-on-ones.
And he was saying, well, you know, I see the person, I know they’re doing well, they’re delivering great work. I see them in action. And again, that’s not the same because that’s not the place where you give feedback when you’re observing them on one-on-one, I’m sorry, in a team meeting. It’s not the place that they may talk about where they’re stuck or struggling. So it doesn’t matter if you spend every single minute of the day in meetings with a team member, it doesn’t take the place of having a one-on-one meeting because you’re going to see a whole different thing kind of comes up in that one-on-one, in that container of having that conversation where you actually ask about things that are not about project status because you already know the product status because you see them every day.
This is where you start to figure out, again, where they’re stuck, celebrate the wins, give them some coaching, mentorship, talk about their career goals. That’s what these one-on-ones are for. And I think if we’re feeling like we don’t have time and that’s the reason we’re not meeting with folks, we can have one-on-ones be 10 minutes, 15 minutes. It doesn’t have to be an hour, doesn’t have to be 30 minutes. And I think having a really clear agenda for these, using an exercise like Rose’s Buds Thorns, which is saying one thing that’s going well, one thing that’s kind of emerging and one thing that’s not going so well, that’s a really easy agenda to touch base on.
Okay, we can celebrate some wins. We can help this person get unstuck and see really what they’re looking forward to. So I love that exercise for that. Also just saying, hey, let’s talk about, share one highlight and one low light or one win and one place that you’re feeling stuck. So having a really kind of clear agenda for the one-on-one, if you have it at 10 or 15 minutes, that’s going to really help so that every week the person, your team member can think about it in advance.
Okay, I got to think of my win, I got to think of my place I’m stuck and then they come prepared. And that’s, I think one of the best practices for one-on-one meetings in general is to have it be a two-way street, have the agenda really clear upfront, have it, if you have a shared document you can both add to that talks about maybe questions that have come up for you throughout the week, questions they might be having so that when you hit that meeting, you are able to really jump right in and talk right through everything that you have.
And so again, now what happens when we have one-on-ones? Okay, so you’re talking about without, on the other side of this, when we make time to regularly meet with our team members, we end up saving so much time. And here’s why, because again, we see problems before they become like bigger issues, okay? Or we see little baby issues before they become bigger problems. We can start to understand what our team members’ body language or behaviors are when they’re feeling stuck, when they’re about to go kind of quiet and spend way too much time on something because they didn’t want to ask a question.
We’re able to celebrate their wins, like I said, which fuels motivation and builds resilience for them putting in some of the extra work when we’re working really hard to hit some milestone and folks are having to really do a sprint with their work. So we start really being able to maximize our team members’ time because we understand the way that they work. We understand what kinds of stretch projects to assign to them and what kind of support they might need to be able to achieve that.
We understand where they could really help build up another team member because we’ve gotten to know them. And so having one-on-ones allows us to really utilize our team in the best way. So that’s why we don’t want to skip them. And that’s why every two months or something like that, it just doesn’t have the same value. And so this is really what I encourage you to do. If you’re feeling like, you know, I just don’t have time, I never can come up with anything to say, you know, I have an episode up on the show notes around, you know, really how to structure that one-on-one conversation.
But essentially, you know, the short answer is highlights, lowlights, where are you getting stuck? I think it’s a really helpful framework and cut it shorter if you have to. It’s okay to say, Hey, I just want a quick pulse check. I want to make sure you have an opportunity to ask me questions. So we’re going to have this standing meeting. And if we need to cancel it, fine, but like, don’t wait till your team member comes to you with a problem.
Because again, not everybody’s going to feel comfortable doing that. And so you might have someone that really needs support that they don’t want to bother you. And that even if you said I’m here anytime and you’re super available and you had time blocked on your calendar for like open space, there’s still going to be folks that don’t come to us without that regular meeting. So having it on the calendar, having it available and you know, if in continually putting it out there that, Hey, I’m here for you whenever you need it.
This is going to build that comfort and the structure does really help with having it, you know, already existing on the calendar. Okay. So that’s it. That’s how we have one-on-ones. That is the answer to our question. Do I need one-on-ones? Yes, you do need one-on-ones. What frequency I’m going to say weekly or biweekly, even every three weeks, but trying to keep it like around that timeframe, not going a month, six weeks, eight weeks without meeting.
And then what to talk about really those, you know, highlights where folks are getting stuck, where you can support them using it way more as a coaching conversation and a recognition conversation than a status update. Save the status updates for emails and for the project tool tracking, whatever you got. And then you’re going to be able to really maximize time and build that relationship. All right. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple Podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.
With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Do I really need to have 1:1 meetings with every team member?
Yes, absolutely. Without regular 1:1s, you have no real way of knowing if a team member is stuck, burned out, or thinking about leaving. You might see their work moving through your tracking system, but that tells you nothing about what's going on internally. Skipping these meetings also sends an unintentional signal that you're prioritizing everything else over them, which chips away at the relationship before it even forms. A 10 to 15 minute check-in on a consistent cadence is enough to catch problems early and build the trust that keeps your team running well.
How often should I have 1:1 meetings with my team members?
Aim for weekly or every two weeks. Every three weeks can still work if your schedule is tight, but try not to go longer than that. Monthly 1:1s start to feel like a checkbox rather than a real connection, and meeting every six to eight weeks barely qualifies as a relationship at all. The whole point is to build enough rapport that you can read when someone is struggling before they say anything. That kind of awareness only comes from consistent, frequent contact, not occasional catch-ups.
What should I actually talk about in a 1:1 meeting with my employee?
Keep it simple: one win, one place they're stuck. You can use a framework called Rose, Bud, Thorn, which covers one thing going well, one thing emerging, and one challenge. The key is to treat it as a coaching and recognition conversation, not a project status update. You already know the status from your tracking tools and team meetings. The 1:1 is where you dig into how the person is actually doing, what support they need, and what goals they're working toward. A shared document where you both add topics before the meeting helps everyone come prepared.
I'm in meetings with my team member every day. Do I still need a separate 1:1 with them?
Yes, seeing someone in team meetings every day is not the same as a 1:1. In a group or project meeting, people rarely admit where they're stuck, and you're not in a position to give direct feedback or talk about their career goals. The 1:1 creates a private container where a completely different kind of conversation can happen. Even if you spend hours together in shared meetings, you still won't know what's going unsaid until you have that dedicated one-on-one time.
What happens when a team member is stuck but won't ask for help?
Many people won't speak up on their own. They worry about bothering you, don't want to stand out, or feel like they should already know the answer. Without a regular 1:1, they end up spinning their wheels, sometimes for hours or days, on problems that already have easy solutions. That wasted time costs you real money and leads to burnout. A consistent 1:1 gives them a built-in, low-pressure moment to surface what's hard without feeling like they're making a big deal out of it. The meeting structure does the work so they don't have to overcome the discomfort of reaching out.