One-to-one
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The Human Resources military-industrial complex
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One-to-one
(also “121”) /wʌn tuː wʌn/ (n.)
The weekly “window” for a meeting with one’s line manager which neither party wants or cares for, whose point is to discharge formal evidential requirements that the manager is managing and her report is being managed.
The 121 agenda is designed to reassure: everything is running smoothly, all projects are on track, all SMART objectives in the process of being met. However the information that makes it onto the formal record — and there may be quite a lot of it —will comprise self-aggrandising bromides and operating statistics having little meaningful impact on the firm’s risk position.
Where it does generate substantive management information, therefore, it will overflow with the employee’s small successes and minor victories — often carried over, without amendment, from week to week — glossed, buffed and spun to exaggerate the subordinate’s tireless industry in the service of revenue generation.
Where possible, it will provided no information at all about unfolding stuff-ups, misunderstandings, missed deadlines or mishandled problems: a subordinate has no greater interest in putting these on the record than her manager has in being formally told about them. Where they loom so large they cannot in good conscience be ignored, they will be expressed briefly and euphemistically, giving as little hint of the unfolding nightmare as possible whilst still being able to claim “I did tell you” should it reach its full potential.
This kind of MIS is, of course, useless: at best it represents “nothing to see here” — at worst it lies about it. Seeing as the 121 is an arbitrary formal requirement to meet the modernist imperative, no-one should be surprised about this.
Manager and report will, actually, see and speak to each other informally every day — at least where things have returned to some kind of post-COVID normality — it is comeing kids, it is coming. These informal exchanges are voluntary: they are desire paths: they happen because their participants need them, and not to satisfy the proclivities of some purblind executive suite sitting on the posh floor. There is no agenda. They will not be minuted. Usually, nothing incriminating will be committed to writing — this is one more reason working from home is suboptimal, by the way — so manager can speak quickly, freely, effectively and provisionally: without fear of putting something discoverable on the record. This is how problems unfold. Information is imperfect. Early judgments may be astray. Opinions and action plans coagulate tentatively out of half-heard interactions, half-thought-through suppositions, and partial exchanges. As the situation coheres, an action plan takes shape. This is how problems get solved — or inflamed, if the staff aren’t up to it.
In any case none of this dynamic is present in the formal weekly one-to-one, except by fortuitous accident. If a manager only finds out what she needs to know at a one-to-one, something is seriously wrong with the team dynamic.
Should there be any unseemly risks or threats, a conscientious direct report will not wait for a weekly one-to-one to alert her manager, but will raise the alarm at once, and a conscientious manager will respond immediately.