Make one-on-ones genuinely theirs, not yours

One-on-ones that serve the manager’s agenda demonstrate the opposite of caring personally.

Why it works

A one-on-one meeting defaults to a status update for the manager unless deliberately structured otherwise. When the agenda serves the manager’s information needs, the implicit message is that the relationship is instrumental — you are checking, not helping. Structuring the meeting around the person’s priorities, blockers, and questions inverts that signal and provides genuine evidence that the manager’s time is allocated to the other person’s development, not just to management convenience.

How to do it

1. Set the expectation: "This is your meeting — bring what you want to work on, what’s blocking you, or what you need from me."
2. Resist filling the silence if they arrive without an agenda — ask prompting questions rather than hijacking with your own items.
3. Save your topics (status, updates, asks) for the last portion and only after their items are addressed.
4. Repeat the questions that work: "What’s the most important thing we should talk about today?" is a reliable opener.

Evidence

Autonomy-supportive management — giving people direction over their own time and priorities — is associated with higher intrinsic motivation and engagement in self-determination theory research. Making one-on-ones employee-led is a structural implementation of that principle. (mechanistic)

Autonomy support in management is well studied; the specific structuring of one-on-ones as employee-led is Scott’s prescription, consistent with but not directly tested against the research.

Sources

• Deci, Connell & Ryan (1989), Self-determination in a work organization, Journal of Applied Psychology

Common mistake

Starting the one-on-one with your items because you’re busy — the person notices that their time was immediately colonized and updates their model of whether you actually care.