Stop Running Your One-on-Ones

Why do well-structured one-on-ones still feel empty? Usually because the leader is supplying both the structure and everything that goes inside it. This one is for any leader who runs consistent, organized one-on-ones and still walks out knowing nothing new. 

Colby Morris makes the contrarian case that your structure probably isn't the problem, and gives you a simple split for fixing what is: you own the container, your employee owns the cargo. 

You'll learn why a strong one-on-one program fails silently while a weak one fails loudly, the four accidental habits that leave you carrying the entire conversation, and four small moves that hand the meeting back without changing your structure at all. 

Plus how to handle the direct report who says "I'm good" every single week. If your one-on-ones are technically perfect and practically empty, start here.

What is The Container and the Cargo?

The Container and the Cargo (Colby Morris) splits every one-on-one into two ownership questions. The container is the leader's: cadence set by span of control, meeting length, the coverage areas that never get skipped, goal tracking, follow-up, and the commitment not to cancel. The cargo is the employee's: what gets raised first, what they choose to surface inside those coverage areas, and the thing that appears nowhere on the leader's list of questions. The failure mode is a leader who supplies both. This is not an argument against structured one-on-one programs. It assumes the structure and addresses what happens inside it.

Why do my one-on-ones feel empty even though I run them consistently?

Because structure is necessary and not sufficient. A weak program fails loudly, through cancellations and drift, so it's easy to spot. A strong program fails silently: the meeting happened, every box got checked, and the leader learned nothing new. Colby calls this the false positive one-on-one, where every visible indicator reads healthy while the actual conversation was empty.

How do I get a quiet direct report to actually talk?

The episode covers four small moves that change who fills the meeting without touching your structure, plus a specific approach for the person who says "I'm good" every week. Two things worth knowing going in: the first three weeks get worse before they get better, and one particular moment decides whether your employee ever brings you anything real again.

Is this episode for you?

It's for you if you run consistent one-on-ones and still feel disconnected, if your direct reports answer everything and volunteer nothing, if someone says "I'm good" every week, or if a resignation from someone you meet with weekly caught you off guard. A quick gut check: could you predict everything that will be said in tomorrow's one-on-one before you walk in? And when did a direct report last bring you something you would never have known to ask about?

Research referenced in this episode

• Flinchum, Kreamer, Rogelberg and Gooty (2023): One-on-one meetings account for nearly half of all workplace meetings, yet have rarely been studied empirically as a distinct meeting type.
• Manager survey data: Roughly 49% of managers report sharing ownership of the one-on-one agenda with their direct reports.
• Kim Scott describes one-on-ones as the most important thing a manager does.

Related episodes

• The One-on-One Series Part 2: The Four Quadrants Every Leader Needs to Cover
• One-on-One Meetings That Work: Build Trust, Track Goals, and Transform Your Team
• The Feedback Blackout (what happens over time when people stop bringing you things)

Connect: 

LinkedIn Colby Morris

NXTStepAdvisors.com

About: The Things Leaders Do is a weekly leadership podcast hosted by Colby Morris, Founder of NXT Step Advisors, delivering practical, immediately actionable leadership tools for middle managers and senior leaders. New episodes every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.

• Colby's LinkedIn Profile
• NXTStepAdvisors.com

Transcript

A Great Manager With Useless One On Ones

SPEAKER_00 0:00

People first leadership. Actionable strategies, real results. This is Things Leaders Do with Colby Morris.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

All right. I want you to picture a leader, the kind who he's doing everything right. He's got the program. Weekly 101s, 30 minutes on the calendar. They're recurring, you know, they're color-coded. He doesn't cancel them. He knows how many direct reports he has, and he's built the cadence around that number on purpose. I mean, he's got his coverage areas. He he knows what every single meeting needs to hit. He walks in with his notes and he's prepared. This guy is not the villain of this leadership podcast. In fact, this guy is a guy other leaders should be learning from.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

But his one-on-ones are useless. Here's what they look like.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

His employee walks in, sits down, and says, So what did you want to talk about? And he's ready for that. I mean, of course he's ready. He's got notes. So he starts. He works his structure. He asks about the project. He, you know, asks about the goals they set last month. He asks if there's anything blocking her. He asks her how she's feeling about the workload, and she answers every time. Good answers. Short, but but good. And then 30 minutes later, he closes his laptop and, you know, he feels fine about it. Covered everything, checked every box. Structure's good. And then he does what? You know, he walks out of that room knowing exactly as much about what's going on in her head as he did when he walked in, which is nothing. So here's the part that should bug you. He will do that same meeting with that same person 52 times this year. 26 hours. That's that's more than three full working days he's gonna spend alone in a room with one human being, and at the end of it, he's not gonna know what she's thinking because you know he's been thinking about leaving since March. So what went wrong? Because the answer is not he needs more structure. He's got structure. The answer isn't, you know, he needs to stop canceling because he didn't cancel. The answer is not he doesn't care. He clearly cares. He built the whole program. What went wrong is that he brought the meeting and he also brought everything that went in it. He was the frame and he was the furniture. And that's the most common way a genuinely good one-on-one program produces genuinely nothing. And that's what we're gonna review today. Hey leaders, this is Colby Morris, and this is the Things Leaders Do podcast. Today, wire 101s can be structurally perfect and still suck. So let's get into it. All

The Silent Failure Of Structured Meetings

SPEAKER_02 3:22

right. So let me start with the thing that makes this problem so slippery because I think this is the actual insight of the whole episode. A bad 101 program fails loudly. You know exactly what that looks like. The meetings get scheduled and then bumped, then bumped again, and then it becomes, hey, we talk all the time anyway, right? Then it wonders. It turns into 20 minutes about somebody's fantasy football team. And everybody, both people, know it's broken. I mean, it's obvious. It announces itself. A good one-on-one program fails silently. That's the whole problem. When you've got real structure, when you've got the cadence built around your span, when you've got your coverage areas and your questions and your goal tracking, you get you get something dangerous. You get a receipt, you get proof that you did the thing. Meeting happened, boxes checked, program working. I call that the false positive one-on-one. Every visible indicator says healthy. The actual conversation, though, that was that was empty. And the structure is what's hiding it from you. And look, I want to be really clear here because I've spent years telling leaders to build exactly that structured. And and I am not walking that back today. Not even a little. The cadence matters. Okay. Building it around how many people you actually lead matters, but knowing that every meeting has to cover matters. And if you don't have that, go build it. But that's a different episode, and I've done a few of them. But structure is necessary, and structure is also not sufficient. Those are two different sentences, and most leadership advice only gives you the first one. Here's some data that reframes this. There's a 2023 review out of the meeting science world, Flincham Creamer, Rogelberg, and Goody, and they point out something wild. 101 meetings make up nearly half of all workplace meetings. Half. And they had barely been studied on their own as a distinct thing. Okay, we have decades of research on team meetings, on group dynamics, on why your Tuesday staff meeting is a war crime, and comparatively almost nothing on the single most common meeting in corporate life. So if you felt like you were kind of guessing at this, you're not imagining it. Everybody's been guessing. Here's the number that points straight at today's problem. In a survey of a couple hundred managers, only about 49% said they share ownership of the 101 agenda with their direct report. 49%. So let's call it half of all managers. And they are bringing the meeting and the entire contents of the meeting. They own the container and they own everything inside it. And they're, you know, they're not lazy. That's what gets me. The manager who owns the whole agenda is usually the one who cares the most. You know, he prepped. He wrote the questions. He's trying. He's just filled every square inch of the room with himself. So here's how I want you to think about this. This

Container Versus Cargo In One On Ones

SPEAKER_02 7:11

is the framework, and it's the thing I want you to actually remember from today. Every one-on-one has two parts. Okay, there's the container, and there's the cargo. The container is yours. Full stop. Okay. That's your structure. That's the cadence you set based on how many people report to you because a leader with four directs and a leader with 14 cannot run the same program. And pretending otherwise is how people just burn out. Okay. The container is the length, the frequency. The coverager is you refuse to skip. The goals that you track every single time, the questions you always ask, the follow-up, the fact that it does not get canceled. You own that. You build it. You should have built it. Don't give one inch of it away. The cargo is theirs. The cargo is what actually goes inside the container. Which thing comes first? What they choose to raise inside your coverage area, the problem you would never have known to ask about. The thing that's been sitting on their chest for three weeks that does not appear anywhere on your very good, very complete list of questions. You own the container, they own the cargo. Let me make that concrete because I think the abstraction there can get slippery. Say one of your coverage areas is development. That's good. That's container. Every single one-on-one, you're going to spend some time on where this person is headed. Non-negotiable, you built that on purpose. But now here's the difference. The container version is you saying, okay, development. So let's talk about that certification we mapped out in January. You pick the topic inside your own category. You loaded your own cargo. The cargo version is you saying, okay, development. What's on your mind there? And then she says something you were not expecting at all. She says she doesn't actually want that certificate anymore. She wants to spend six months on the operation side, and she's been sitting on that since about March because she didn't want you to think she was ungrateful. Same coverage area, same 30 minutes, same structure, completely unchanged. One version, it it confirms the plan you already had. The other one tells you your best person is quietly pointed in a different direction than you think she is. And that's the whole difference. And notice you didn't have to loosen your structure by one degree to get it. And the failure mode, the thing that happened to our guy in the cold open is that the leader supplies both. You build the frame and then you also fill every slot inside it. You ask, they answer. You ask, they answer. You fill the silence because silence is uncomfortable and you're a helper. You move to the next item because you've got seven minutes left and two coverage areas to go. Yeah. The structure ran perfectly. And the only person generating content in that room, well, that was you. Let me put it another way. If you can predict everything that's going to be said in a one-on-one before you walk in, you're not having a conversation. You're having a recital. I don't know. You're you wrote it, you conduct it, and they're just hitting their marks. Kim Scott calls one-on-ones the most important thing you do as a manager. I'll add one word to that. They're the most important thing you do as a manager if something you didn't plan comes out of them. All right. So nobody decides to do this. Let me show you the four ways it happens by accident because I'd bet money you're doing at least two of them, and one of them is probably gonna hurt.

Four Habits That Kill Real Talk

SPEAKER_02 11:26

Number one, you go first. Every single time you open the meeting, why wouldn't you? I mean, it's your meeting, right? You called it, you're the leader, and honestly, there's a that little bit of nature of horrors of vacuum in there, too. Somebody's got to start, and you're the one with the notes. But really, whoever goes first sets the entire frame. If you open with the project timeline, you just told her the meeting is about the project timelines. Everything she was thinking about bringing up now has to fight its way in, you know, sideways against that agenda that you've already established in the first 40 seconds. And honestly, most people aren't going to fight it. Okay, they'll just answer what you asked. Number two, the prep is lopsided. You prepared, right? You got a list. You reviewed last month's goals, you pulled the numbers, you're you're ready to go. She prepared nothing. Not because she's disengaged, but because nobody told her to. From where she sits, this is a meeting she gets invited to, not to a meeting that she brings anything to. Yeah. I'm gonna say that one more time. She probably weren't listening. From where she sits, this is a meeting that she just got invited to. It's not a meeting that she's supposed to bring anything to. She shows up in receive mode. And a person in receive mode will answer literally anything you ask and volunteer literally nothing. Two prepared people have a conversation. One prepared person conducts an interview.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Number three, you solve too fast.

SPEAKER_02 13:17

She brings up something small. A real thing, but small. And hey, I mean, you're good at your job, so you fix it right there. 11 seconds, boom, handled. Next. Feels like great leadership, right? Feels efficient. Well, here's what she learned. She learned that things she brings get converted into action items and taken off her plate before she's finished describing them. So next time, when the thing on her mind is bigger and messier and she's not sure she even wants it solved yet. You think she's gonna bring it to you? Nah, she just doesn't bring it because she doesn't want it solved yet. She wants to think out loud with somebody she trusts. And hey, I I have done this one. I am a recovering 11-second fixer. Okay. It is genuinely hard to sit in a problem you could solve immediately and not solve it.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

But I mean, that's the job sometimes. Number four, you treat silence like a fire.

SPEAKER_02 14:23

Like that pause, sir. You ask something like, anything else on your mind? And she says, No, I think we're good. And it's been about a second and a half, and that second and a half feels like a geological era, so you feel it. Okay, great. So on the Henderson thing, here's the thing about that pause. That's not an empty pause. That is a person deciding whether to say the real thing. Every single time you fill that gap, you make that decision for her, and you're you always make it the same way. You you decide no. And by the way, I did a whole episode last week on what happens over the long haul when you keep, you know, when or when your people keep deciding to not bring you the real thing. That's the feedback blackout episode. And this right here is it's one of the rooms where that blackout gets built. And it's one polite pause at a time. So go listen to that one after this one. Okay. So how do you hand over the cargo without giving up the container?

Four Small Moves That Change Everything

SPEAKER_02 15:32

Because I I do not want you walking out of here and blowing up a program that you took a year to build. Okay. There's four moves, and all of them are pretty small. None of them require you to change your structure at all. So, move one, preload it. The day before, send one message. Hey, for tomorrow, what's the one thing you you know you most want to make sure we cover? And that's it. That's the whole intervention, and it might be the single most useful sentence in this episode because now she's thinking about it before she walks in. Now she's prepared too. Now there are two prepared people in the room, and you have a conversation instead of a staking interview. And notice what this does not do. It does not remove a single word of your coverage areas. Okay, your structure is completely intact. You just added one item to the front of it, and it's hers. So move two is go second. She brings her things first. You work your structure after. This is one that kind of feels wrong, and I want to name why. It feels like losing control of the meeting. It's actually the opposite. You still cover everything you were always going to cover. You're just not, just not letting your agenda define the room before she's even had a chance to put anything in it. And here's the the, I guess the practical payoff. About a third of the time, whatever she leads with is going to make one of your prepared questions irrelevant or maybe even more interesting. You cannot get that if you go first. Now, I know somebody's already worrying about the clock. So let me deal with that. Kobe, if I if I let her go first, she'll talk for 25 minutes and I'll never get to my coverage areas. Okay. Two things. One, that almost never happens. And when it does happen, it's usually because something was genuinely stacked up and probably needed to come out, which means that was the most viable meeting you've had with that person in a year. So let it run. Two, if it does become a pattern, you don't fix it by taking the meeting back. You fix it out loud and basically right at the beginning. Hey, I want to hear your stuff first. And I've also got three things I have to cover today. So let's give you the first, say, 15. Now she knows the shape of it. You didn't take the cargo back, you just told her how big the container is. That's a completely different move from quietly reasserting your agenda because you got uncomfortable. All right, move three. Sit in the pause. When you ask what's on her mind and she says, nothing really. Count to five. Count to seven, count to eight, but count okay, count in your head, okay, silently. Don't don't rescue her. And I'm telling you, it this can be excruciating. Five to seven seconds of silence in a small room with another human being is one of the longest experiences available to a leader. You will want to feel it so badly. Your whole body is gonna want to speak. But don't. A lot of the most important things I've ever heard from a team member arrived somewhere around the four second mark. All right. Move four. Do not solve on contact. Again, when she brings something before you fisk it, fix it, ask one question. Are you looking for help with this? Or did you just want me to know about it? That question is small and it does an enormous amount of work. Sometimes she wants it solved and now you can solve it properly instead of reflexively. And sometimes she just needs you to know. And now you've learned that you can be told things without immediately converting it into a task. That's how you become a safe place to put information.

When Your Direct Report Brings Nothing

SPEAKER_02 20:06

All right, let's deal with the hard case because uh somebody listening is thinking, Colby, this is great, but my guy has nothing every week. I ask, he says he's good, and that's the whole meeting. Okay. Well, first thing, it's usually not a personality problem. I know it feels like one. But if this person has spent two years in a meeting where you supply everything, I'm good is not avoidance. It's the correct answer to the meeting he's actually been attending. You trained a receive mode habit, and now you're frustrated that it worked. The second thing, and this matters, the first three weeks of the handoff are going to be worse, not not better. Okay? He will come in with nothing. You'll preload and he'll forget. You'll go second and there will be nothing to go second to, and you'll sit there in a silence with the structural integrity of wet cardboard. But push through it anyway. Okay, you're asking somebody to unlearn a habit you spent two years building. Three weeks? That's cheap. The third thing, if he's genuinely got nothing, don't just repeat anything on your mind louder. Okay? That question is too big. A vague question is gonna get a vague answer. And how's it going is the vaguest question in the English language. So get smaller and more specific. Hey, what what was the most annoying part of your week? That one works because everybody's got an answer. Or hey, what's something we do here that you'd change if you could? Or what's taking you way longer than it should? Notice those aren't emotional excavations. Okay. Nobody has to be vulnerable to answer them. Okay. They're just specific enough to be answerable. And I mean, every one of them opens a door to something real, right? And when he finally does bring something, this is the moment that decides everything. What you do with the first real thing he brings determines whether there's ever going to be a second one. Okay, let me let me slow down on that because leaders blow this constantly and they never find out they blow it. The first real thing is usually never the big thing. It's it's actually a test. It's small on purpose. He's going to bring you something manageable, something that's, you know, low stakes, low risk, and then he's going to watch what happens to it. Okay, not what you say about it, but what happens to it. So take it seriously in proportion. Okay, don't overreact. Don't turn a small comment into a task force. Because now he knows that anything he says, well, that becomes an initiative and he will never speak again. And don't wave it off, you know, either. Do do something real and uh, I guess appropriately sized. Okay, the response should match what's happening. And then, and this is the part that usually gets skipped. Go back and tell him what you did. Hey, that thing you mentioned about the handoff last week, I talked to Dana about it. Here's what we changed. What was that? A couple seconds? That's the entire trust mechanism. He learns that the things he says to you go somewhere and come back. And once he's learned that, the second thing he brings to you will probably be bigger. And the third one will be the thing you probably actually needed to know six months ago. If you want the deeper cut on what every meeting should cover, I want you to go back to the one-on-one series, part two, the four quadrants. That's the container work. Today is about who's filling it. All right, let's bring this

Keep The Structure And Make Space

SPEAKER_02 24:31

home. Here's what I want you to take out of this. Your structure is not the problem. Okay. If you've built a real one-on-one program and the cadence you know set by your span, coverage areas you don't skip, goals you actually are tracking, you are so far ahead of most leaders, and you should keep every bit of it. But a perfect container full of your own voice, that is an empty meeting. You own the container, they own the cargo. And if you're supplying both, you're going to keep walking out of 30 perfectly executed minutes and know nothing you didn't already know. So this week, do the small version. Okay. Send one message the day before asking what they want to cover. Let them go first. And when they say nothing really, count to five, count to seven before you say anything. And that's it. Your structure doesn't change. Your calendar doesn't change. What changes is who's doing the talking and what you find out. Because the meeting was never really the point. The meeting was always just the room you built so that the real things would have somewhere to happen. Okay, before we go, if you've built the program and it's running exactly like it's supposed to, and you still had this nagging feeling that you don't actually know what's going on with your people, that's a real thing and it is fixable. That's a lot of what I do through Next Step Advisors, working with leaders and their teams on X executive coaching, leadership training, keynote speaking. And if your one-on-ones are technically perfect and practically empty, I'd love to talk. Hey, connect with me on LinkedIn. Just search Colby Morris or head to next stepadvisors.com and I have links to both in the show notes. And if this was useful, please do me a favor and subscribe wherever you listen. And here's the main thing: please leave me a review, okay, and send it to a leader who runs those very tight meetings and they're coming up empty. But those reviews are huge. That's how we get the word out to more leaders and we can get better leaders faster. And remember, keep building the structure because it matters. Keep going forward and keep leaving room for the thing they actually came to say. And you know why? Because those are the things that leaders do.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

Thank you for listening to Things Leaders Do. If you're looking for more tips on how to be a better leader, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and listen to next week's episode. Until next time, keep working on being a better leader by doing the things that leaders do.