Discussion on:

One-on-ones: Useful tool or waste of time?

It seems to me that a weekly one-on-one with each member of a team is mostly a pointless time waster - especially if you allocate a whole hour!
If you are working with your team, you already know what is holding them up or causing problems for individuals in the team (you see the interpersonal dynamics first hand and they tell you immediately about any work problems because you are there).
New information and project updates would be best communicated at project meetings where the whole team is present.
If your reports are more senior and are working with their own teams, you would expect them to have the nous to let you know when they need to talk to you.
So, apart from the occasional exceptional situation, why waste all that time forboth yourself and the team?

Every week, everyone in my group sends the manager a status report. Every two weeks, every individual in my group has a one on one with the manager. We're in the Software Applications group of a I.S. dept for a manufacturing company. As with most I.S./I.T departments, we are getting pulled in a million different directions. The one on one along with the status reports help keep my manager informed on what we are doing. I don't want my manager blind sided by a potential problem. The one on one also helps me further expand on items in my status report and bring up and discuss issues. To keep us nimble, many times my manager adjusts our priorities. Sometimes when you are in the trenches, you loose sight of the big picture; these one on one meetings help bring that into focus.

Rather than having a regularly scheduled meeting where the employee comes to the manager's office to have a "How's it going?" discussion, I prefer to go to the employee and job shadow for a while.

Currently, in software development this is refered to as "Pair Programming," but it is equally applicable to other tasks (Tom Peters called it managing by walking around). There is no better way to understand the situation an employee is in than to see it first hand. There is a lot of informationthat does not get communicated well verbally.

I would not do this on a regularly scheduled basis, as I find there are periods when my time is almost fully taken up by upper management, other departments, and other outsiders. Be sure to schedule all of your employees equally, so that none appears to be singled out for the boss's praise or wrath.

As an intern in a french software company, I had to suffer from my boss absolutue lack of communication will. The internship was a catastopher : I didn't understood the subject that I initially thought to be a plus in my futur career, and I found myself in that difficult position in where I had to beg for meetings with him, and he wouldn't talk to me for weeks... And when the meeting finally took place, whatever difficulties that I would rise where either minimized, or seen as hard critics...
I think those differencies come from the fact that the modern management techniques aren't so well understood in Europe (let's avoid other cultures), in where there's always been a conflict between bosses and their employees : every single misunderstanting has to end in a conflict (he thought that I was incompetent, I thought the same about him).