Eleven one on one mistakes I made as an engineering manager

Every one of these is mine. Some of them I repeated for years, and a couple I still catch myself doing in a bad month. They are ordered roughly by how much damage they do relative to how normal they look.

1. Turning it into a status review

You ask what they are working on, they list it, you nod. Nothing wrong happened and nothing useful happened either. Status has a home in the tracker and in standup. When it takes over the 1-1, the only conversation with nowhere else to go gets evicted.

The fix is a different opening question. What is on your mind, then silence. It feels awkward for about three sessions and then people start arriving with real topics.

2. Cancelling when the week gets heavy

The 1-1 is the easiest thing in the calendar to move because the other person will always say it is fine. It is not fine. Cancelling twice in a row tells someone exactly where they sit in your priority list, regardless of what you say about it.

Shorten instead of cancelling. Fifteen minutes held is worth more than thirty minutes rescheduled into next week and then quietly dropped.

3. Talking more than they do

I once recorded a rough count of my own talking in a week of 1-1s and it was somewhere near seventy percent. I had been calling that mentoring. If you are doing most of the talking, you are running a briefing.

4. Saving feedback for the review cycle

Nothing in a performance review should be new information. Feedback that waits four months arrives detached from the situation, feels like an ambush, and cannot be acted on because the project is over.

Say it in the 1-1 that follows the thing, in the middle of the meeting, in two sentences and specific.

5. Forgetting what they told you

Someone tells you in March that they want to move toward architecture work. In July an architecture project appears and you staff it with whoever is free. You did not deprioritise them, you forgot. From their side those are identical.

This is the mistake that survives every good intention, because memory does not scale with the number of reports. Write it down the day you hear it and re-read before the next conversation.

6. Letting follow-ups die

You agree to look into the contractor budget. Three weeks pass. They do not raise it again, not because it stopped mattering but because raising it twice feels like nagging their boss. What actually died was their belief that saying things to you produces outcomes.

7. Solving instead of listening

The reflex is fast and it feels helpful. Ask whether they want help thinking or help doing before you start. Half the time the answer is neither, they want the thing to be heard by someone with authority.

8. The same three questions every week

How is it going, any blockers, anything from me. After a month people have prepared answers and the meeting becomes a script with two actors. Rotate one wider question per session and the conversation stays alive.

9. Only meeting the people who are easy

The quiet senior engineer who never brings problems gets moved to monthly. The person going through something difficult gets the full attention. That looks reasonable and it is how you lose your strongest performer to a recruiter with no warning.

10. Running the hard conversation inside the normal slot

Bringing a serious performance conversation into the weekly 1-1 poisons the slot. Every future session carries the memory. Book it separately and name it in the invitation so nobody spends thirty minutes waiting for it.

11. No notes, or notes nobody re-reads

Notes that are written and never opened again are just a way of feeling organised. The value is entirely in the two minutes of reading before the next meeting, not in the writing.

The pattern underneath all of them

Nine of these eleven are memory and attention problems wearing different clothes. Not care problems. You care about the person, you had thirty other things that week, and the thread quietly went cold.

• Write three lines after every 1-1: what was said, what changed, what is open.
• Re-read them for two minutes before the next one.
• Track commitments with owners, including your own.
• Hold the slot even when it has to shrink.

That is the whole system, and it is the part that breaks first in a busy quarter. I could not hold it by hand past about six reports, which is why LeaderCues exists. You write a short note after each 1-1 and it brings back the open threads before the next one. There is a free plan, and a comparison of the other options in the guide to 1-1 meeting tools if you would rather do it another way.