Why Senior Leaders Should Stop Having So Many One-on-Ones - Harvard Business Review

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Our advice to CEOs and C-suite leaders: Stop having so many 1:1 meetings.

The Hidden Costs of Executive 1:1 Meetings

In most large organizations, 1:1 meetings are usually seen as necessary for alignment, decision-making, or relationship management. But at the top of an enterprise, the very structure of these meetings is working against the organization’s best interests and many meetings shouldn’t be happening in the first place.

Lower in the organization, 1:1 meetings may make more sense when people are guiding middle managers, supervisors, or individual contributors. But here’s the counterintuitive truth: The more 1:1 meetings senior executives have, the more fragmented and functionally siloed the organization can become.

Too many One-on-Ones create four core problems:

Fragmented governance

Each 1:1 functions like a mini steering committee, but with no one else in the room. Governance becomes informal and duplicative, requiring rework and follow-up meetings just to keep others up to speed. Worse, viewpoints that weren’t considered in the initial 1:1 then surface later on, leading to friction that could have been avoided. When too much time is spent in fragmented meetings, there’s little left for the work that only senior leaders can do: stewarding enterprise priorities, developing talent, and advancing culture.

Functional bias

One-on-ones reinforce a view of the organization as a set of departments rather than a web of capabilities. Over time, this strengthens silos instead of creating cross-functional coherence. And it forces the CEO or senior leader to act as the sole integrator of cross-functional perspectives.

Decision repackaging

Executives waste valuable time repeating, translating, or defending decisions made privately. This not only slows momentum—it breeds misalignment and friction downstream. Trust erodes over time, and leaders become conditioned to use their 1:1s to game the system and distort the truth to ensure their views prevail.

Executive rivalry and collusion

Succession overhang and ambition can subtly foster competition among top leaders. One-on-ones become arenas for inside influence, where leaders can imply advantage by referencing private access (“In my 1:1 with Bill this morning…”), creating a sense of secrecy and status that erodes collective trust.

CEOs can also be guilty of leveraging their 1:1s to extract information about other team members, creating a false sense of “insider intimacy” with direct reports that ultimately undermines psychological safety. One CEO I urged to reduce his 1:1s actually lamented to me, “But how will I get all of the inside scoops I don’t get anywhere else?”

A Better Way to Use Executives’ Time: Capability Meetings

The alternative is to re-engineer the way executive time is used. Instead of relying on 1:1s for operational discussions, CEOs and senior executives should convene small, cross-functional “capability meetings”—1:2 or 1:3 conversations that reflect how value is actually created.

For example, innovation isn’t owned by R&D, marketing, or customer experience alone; it lives in the seams between them. Bringing those leaders together—at the same table—ensures strategic clarity, accelerates coordination, and strengthens shared ownership.

Here are five ways to begin:

Reserve 1:1s for development.

Shift 1:1s to a quarterly cadence and use them solely for the individual’s growth, feedback, and career development. These conversations deserve focused, undivided attention—not to be diluted by operational updates or real-time firefighting.

You can block 90-minute quarterly sessions that are clearly labeled “development conversation.” Structure them around reflection, feedback, and future goals. Avoid sliding into tactical issues. Use prompts like “What are you learning about yourself as a leader this quarter?” or “What would stretch you in a meaningful way next year?”

At one global consumer goods company, the COO redesigned her 1:1 structure by implementing a “career check-in” model: quarterly sessions focused entirely on each direct report’s long-term goals, with zero slides or project updates. This shift dramatically improved retention and succession visibility within her team.

Convene around capabilities.

Map out your enterprise’s most critical capabilities like innovation, digital transformation, or customer loyalty, and structure standing meetings around the cross-functional intersections that enable them.

Identify the five to seven capabilities that create differentiated value in your business. For each, bring together the two to four functions most essential to delivering that value. These “capability councils” become the forums for near-term decision-making, trade-offs, and shared execution, saving the full executive team’s time for truly enterprise-wide strategies and opportunities.

Melissa worked with her team to reframe their strategic priorities into capability areas—like “virtual care experience” and “clinical operations technologies”—and created standing 1:3 capability meetings that included product, operations, and engineering leaders. As a result, go-to-market cycles shortened by 20%, and duplication and friction across teams dropped significantly.

Ensure the right people are listening.

One of the quiet inefficiencies of 1:1s is that they pull decisions into private channels, where the people most affected often aren’t present. That means leaders have to replay discussions for others later, or relitigate decisions once new information surfaces, leading to misunderstanding, misalignment, or delayed action.

You can use capability meetings to bring together the specific leaders whose functions intersect around a given issue. This ensures that the people who need to understand and act on the information are hearing it at the moment it matters. No one has to wait to be briefed later. This kind of targeted presence builds sharper shared judgment and eliminates the need to re-translate decisions across silos.

At a financial services firm I’ve consulted with, the CEO replaced many of his 1:1s with capability meetings like “go to market,” “operational efficiency,” or “enterprise talent,” convening various combinations of the heads of risk, compliance, sales, and human resources, as well as the business unit general managers, to discuss capability-focused topics. Because the right people were hearing the context in real time, execution accelerated. Leaders no longer had to “sell” decisions afterward or decipher what had happened behind closed doors because they were in the room when it happened.

Elevate executive team time.

When too many decisions happen in private 1:1s, full executive team meetings often devolve into catch-up sessions, replaying decisions, clarifying miscommunications, or managing interpersonal fallout. That robs the team of the chance to focus on the truly enterprise-wide work only they can do.

By using capability meetings to handle cross-functional execution and trade-offs at the right level, executive team time can be reserved for strategic sensemaking, cultural stewardship, and long-horizon bets. Center agendas around questions like “What are the few issues that require the full weight of this team?” or “Where does our system need realignment?”

One Fortune 100 company overhauled its monthly executive team meeting after realizing that too much time was spent relitigating decisions made elsewhere. By reassigning operational decision-making to triads tied to core capabilities, they cleared the decks for their senior team to focus on systemic enterprise priorities—like cultural resilience, the innovation pipeline, scenario planning for disruptions, and global portfolio shifts. The result was faster execution at the edges and deeper strategic coherence at the center.

Minimize executive rivalry.

Succession dynamics often create a subtle undercurrent of competition. One-on-ones can exacerbate this by enabling power plays through implied exclusivity or “private access” to the CEO.

By moving operational discussions into small group formats, the executive team begins to operate with greater transparency and mutual accountability. The “I know something you don’t” dynamic is replaced with shared context and visible contributions. Make it clear that real influence comes from collaboration, not proximity. And the reduction of back-channel gossip allows genuine trust to flourish.

One CEO I’ve coached at a global logistics firm noticed rising tension among his direct reports, often rooted in whispered references to what was said in private meetings, including ways he’d leveraged what he’d learned in them. He eliminated his 1:1s entirely. Within two quarters, those “status flexes” disappeared, and the team began naming a new culture of “leadership without leverage.”

Ultimately, this isn’t just about meeting efficiency. It’s about leadership effectiveness. The role of senior executives isn’t to manage functions in isolation. It’s to enable the organization’s full capacity to perform, adapt, and grow. That requires seeing and leading the seams, not just the silos.

Minimizing 1:1s may feel uncomfortable at first. But for leaders ready to shape the organization they want, not just maintain the one they have, it’s a powerful step forward.

To read the full Harvard Business Review article, please click here.

Source: Carucci, R. (2025, July 8). Why senior leaders should stop having so many one‑on‑ones. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2025/07/why-senior-leaders-should-stop-having-so-many-one-on-ones