How to run effective 1:1s as a new engineering manager

If you’ve just become an engineering manager, the one-on-one is the single highest-leverage habit you have — and the one most new managers quietly get wrong. Done well, your 1:1s are where trust is built, problems surface early, and people grow. Done badly, they’re a weekly status meeting that both of you would rather skip.

The good news: running good 1:1s is a skill, not a talent. Here’s how to get the fundamentals right from the start.

Get the purpose right first

The most important thing to internalise: the 1:1 is your report’s meeting, not yours. It’s not for status updates you could read in a tracker. It’s for the things that only a regular, private, trusting conversation can produce — how they’re really doing, what’s in their way, where they want to grow, and the feedback that flows both directions.

New managers often invert this. They fill the time with their own updates and questions about delivery, and within a month the report has learned the meeting is about the manager’s needs. Resist it. If you take one idea from this post, take that one.

Set a cadence and protect it

Pick a rhythm — weekly is the safe default for most teams, biweekly if you have many reports or a very senior team — and then guard it like it matters, because it does. The fastest way to signal that someone is unimportant is to repeatedly cancel or reschedule their 1:1 when things get busy. And things will always get busy.

Thirty minutes is plenty when the time is used well. The consistency matters far more than the length: a reliable 25 minutes every week beats a luxurious hour that happens whenever you remember.

Prepare — it takes five minutes

Walking in cold is the most common reason 1:1s drift into status. Before each one, spend a few minutes on three questions: What did we agree last time, and did it happen? What’s changed for this person since — a tough launch, a win, a missed deadline? What’s one thing I want to make sure we talk about?

That’s it. A little prep turns a vague catch-up into a conversation with continuity, and continuity is what makes people feel genuinely managed rather than merely met with.

Run the conversation

A simple shape that works: start human, give them the floor, then take a smaller slice for your own topics, and close by writing down what you each committed to. We break that down in detail — with time allocations and variations — in our 1:1 meeting template.

Inside the conversation, the skill that matters most is listening. New managers tend to fill silences and rush to solve. Don’t. Ask an open question, then wait. The best follow-up is almost always “tell me more about that.” If you want a deeper well to draw from, we’ve collected 50 one-on-one questions grouped by what they’re for.

The mistakes new EMs make most

• Turning it into status. If you could get the information from a board, it doesn’t belong here.
• Doing all the talking. Aim to listen more than you speak. If you’re talking most of the time, it’s not a 1:1, it’s a briefing.
• Skipping feedback. Both kinds. Specific praise and gentle redirection both land best in the privacy of a 1:1 — and asking for feedback on yourself builds more trust than almost anything else.
• Letting follow-ups evaporate. A commitment you make and forget teaches people to stop bringing you problems. Write them down and actually close them.

Your very first 1:1 with someone

The first 1:1 with a new report — or your first as their new manager — sets the tone for every one after it, so don’t spend it on status. Spend it establishing how you’ll work together. A few questions worth asking up front:

• How do you like to be managed? What did your best manager do that I should know about?
• How do you prefer to get feedback — in the moment, or considered and written down?
• What does a good week look like for you? What does a bad one feel like?
• What are you hoping to get better at while we’re working together?
• What should I know about how you work that isn’t obvious?

Then share a little of how you operate, so it goes both ways: how often you’ll meet, what you’ll use 1:1s for, and what they can expect from you. Ending the first one with a clear sense of “this is your time, and it’s about you” is worth more than any agenda.

Running 1:1s with a remote team

Remote and hybrid 1:1s need more deliberate care, because you lose the ambient signal you’d pick up in an office — the body language, the hallway catch-up, the sense of how someone’s really doing. Three adjustments help:

• Guard the check-in. The human few minutes at the start matter more when they’re the only unstructured contact you get. Don’t let a packed agenda crowd them out.
• Default to camera on, but don’t force it. Seeing a face tells you things a voice doesn’t — and if someone always keeps theirs off, that can itself be worth gently noticing.
• Use a shared doc. A running agenda you both add to during the week means the conversation isn’t built from scratch, and quieter people get a way to raise things they wouldn’t say out loud.

When you don’t know what to talk about

Some weeks there’s no obvious agenda, and new managers panic — or cancel. Don’t. A quiet 1:1 is still worth having; it’s a deposit in an account you’ll want to draw on when something is wrong. Fall back on a rotating question: how’s the workload, what would make next week better, what have you been meaning to bring up. The relationship is built in the ordinary weeks, not the dramatic ones — which is exactly why protecting the cadence when there’s “nothing to discuss” matters so much.

Make it stick

The hardest part of 1:1s isn’t any single conversation — it’s the continuity across all of them, especially once you’re managing five or six people. Remembering who’s overdue, what each person raised three weeks ago, and which follow-ups are still open is real cognitive load, and it’s exactly where new managers drop the ball.

That’s the problem CoManager’s 1:1 hub is built to take off your plate: it tracks your cadence and flags an overdue check-in, pre-loads every agenda with open threads and last time’s follow-ups, and turns anything you commit to into a tracked action. You bring the listening; it handles the memory.