For decades, the one-on-one meeting has been a sacred ritual of managerial life. It’s the office equivalent of a treadmill session: repetitive, well-intentioned, and mostly endured out of guilt.

Conventional wisdom says every manager should have regular 1:1s with their direct reports to build trust, boost engagement, and drive performance. However, as work evolves—with a faster pace, flatter structures, hybrid and asynchronous communication, AI tools that manage tasks more efficiently than most humans ever will—it’s worth asking: Do we still need all these 1:1s? READ MORE