This article originally appeared on Jhana, our bite-sized online solution for leaders and individual contributors.
1. Staying quiet if your manager doesn’t do 1-on-1s — or consistently cancels them.
When else will you have a chance to talk with your manager about how to get better at your job? The issues holding you back? Your work/life balance, stress level, and career goals? How the company’s overall strategy relates to your role? If you’re not getting the time and space you need for these critical topics, that’s worth addressing.
If your manager doesn’t hold recurring 1-on-1s with anyone on the team, consider asking your peers if they’d be interested in pitching the idea of 1-on-1s to your manager. Sometimes a collective request is more powerful. It will also help ensure that everyone gets an equal opportunity to have 1-on-1 time with your boss.
If you’re the only one who isn’t getting 1-on-1 time, try approaching your manager directly:
“I’d love the chance to regularly discuss my development, other ways I can help the team, my work/life balance, and other topics in a recurring 1-on-1. Is there a day and time that might work for you?”
If your manager schedules 1-on-1s but is a chronic canceler, you might say something like:
“This day and time for my 1-on-1s don’t seem to be working for your schedule. Is there another day or time that would be better?”
2. Approaching 1-on-1s as an obligation instead of an opportunity.
A recurring 1-on-1 with your manager might seem onerous if you have an endless to-do list, dislike meetings, or associate 1-on-1s with nerve-wracking events like performance reviews. But regular 1-on-1s can be enormously beneficial to you, your manager, and the whole team. They provide the opportunity to share ups and downs, get feedback and guidance, map out and track career and learning goals, and discuss the decisions that affect everyone’s day-to-day work.
3. Leaving it to your manager to set the agenda.
By taking ownership of the agenda, you’ll be able to make room for the topics that matter most to you. You may even find that your manager is delighted when you offer to take on this task.
You can take the lead on creating agendas — or easily (and diplomatically) disrupt a routine of manager-generated agendas — by saying something like:
“I’d love the opportunity to draft an agenda for our 1-on-1s going forward. I can send it to you a day in advance so you have the chance to make any changes or additions. Could we give that a try?”
4. Canceling.
Canceling a 1-on-1 can cause alarm bells to go off in your manager’s head. They might assume that you’re checked out, struggling to handle your workload (in which case, that’s something to bring up in a 1-on-1, not avoid!), sidestepping feedback, or something else. Or, if your manager tends to be more hands-off, you could set a precedent that leads to them canceling more frequently — and you to losing precious face time with them.
If you really must cancel, give your manager as much notice as possible and ask to reschedule for the next available time slot.
5. Not talking enough.
The power dynamic inherent in manager-employee relationships often results in skewed conversations. You might inadvertently fall into a pattern of holding back and mostly just listening in your 1-on-1s. That’s not all bad — it’s important to know what matters to your manager so that you can meet their expectations. But if they do the majority of the talking, you won’t be giving them a chance to meet yours.
Setting the agenda (see No. 3) will help. You can also take full advantage of the air time you do get. For example, say your manager tends to ramble, but opens 1-on-1s by asking how you’re doing. Instead of a rote answer like “I’m good. How are you?” point the conversation in the direction you’d like to go:
“I’m good, thanks! I’ve been looking forward to this conversation because I’m a little confused about how project X fits with the rest of our team goals, and it would help me to talk through some of the ways I see it conflicting with other priorities.”
6. Spending most of your 1-on-1 time on status updates.
Communicating where things stand with your work is necessary, but often better handled in a weekly email, team meetings, or ongoing updates to a project management or chat tool. Otherwise, your 1-on-1s can get devoured by small, less important details of your day-to-day, and you’ll rarely get to the deeper stuff: career development, big ideas, skill-building goals, frustrations, performance expectations, and feedback.
If you tend to default to just sharing what’s on your plate or your manager seems fixated on plodding through your to-do list week after week, suggest an alternative:
“Before we meet in our 1-on-1s, I could share a list of what I completed during the week and what work remains for each project. That would give us more time in our 1-on-1s to dig into any questions you have about the projects, as well as other other topics. Could we try that?”
7. Avoiding, rather than proactively sharing, bad but critical news.
A major customer is angry with you. It’s looking like you’ll miss a deadline. You’re experiencing health issues and can’t work at full capacity.
Some people put off bringing up these types of issues in 1-on-1s for fear of making themselves look bad or upsetting their manager. However, you’ll look a lot worse if you wait and the situation spirals out of control. Then, your manager will have less time to react and come up with a plan. Everyone makes mistakes and suffers setbacks — and by saying something as soon as you see trouble on the horizon, you could win your manager’s respect.
8. Never or rarely asking for meaningful feedback.
In a perfect world, you’d automatically get a steady dose of inspiring, helpful feedback from your manager. But few people do. According to one poll, only 26 percent of employees can make that claim.
Why not take matters into your own hands? Instead of nervously dreading (or eagerly hoping for) feedback, use your 1-on-1s to get the input you need by letting your manager know a few days before about what feedback you’d like. That way, you’ll be able to regularly gauge where you stand, adjust your performance and behavior, and avoid getting blindsided during a performance review.
9. Never or rarely giving meaningful feedback.
Giving feedback upward can be challenging. A lot depends on the person you report to and the strength of your relationship, your team and company culture around feedback, and how you go about it. But there are plenty of managers who really want to know how they’re doing as a leader! In fact, they might be frustrated by how difficult it is for them to get honest input. Who better to provide it than the people they’re leading?
If your manager asks for feedback or is open to hearing it from you and others on the team, embrace the chance to not only help them succeed but also potentially make your own work life better, too.
Not sure how your boss will react? Compliments are generally safer than constructive criticism. To reduce the chance that your manager thinks you’re just flattering them, be specific and explain how what they’re doing impacts you. Another approach is to start with relatively safe topics for redirecting feedback (e.g., an ineffective work process or tool the team uses) versus riskier ones like a behavior by your manager that makes your life difficult. Once you have a better sense of how your manager handles feedback, you can decide how to approach delivering messages that might be harder for them to hear.