No. Scheduled status one-to-ones with your executive team make you the only source of accountability and keep every cross-functional problem in a silo. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang runs 60 direct reports with no scheduled one-on-ones. Replace them with a daily huddle, a shared scoreboard and team coaching in the room.
Here’s a habit I see in scale-up after scale-up, and hardly anyone questions it.
The weekly one-to-one.
Picture a Friday afternoon. You’re on your fourth of the day. Your head of sales is explaining, quite reasonably, why the pipeline slipped: delivery couldn’t onboard the last two clients fast enough. So you nod, make a note, and promise to raise it with your head of delivery at half past three.
Feels like good management, doesn’t it?
It isn’t. You’ve just agreed to carry a message between two people who sit ten yards apart. And you’ll do it again next week, because six direct reports at an hour each, plus the ten minutes either side, is a full working day. Over a year that’s more than 40 working days of being the postman.
Why do CEOs still run weekly one-to-ones with their executives?
Because it feels like managing.
When the company was twelve people it ran like a hub and spoke. Everything went through you, you knew everything, and honestly it worked. Then the company grew and the habit didn’t. It had to live somewhere, so it moved into the weekly one-to-one, and now it’s the only way your executive team has ever known.
I put this to Verne Harnish, founder of Scaling Up, when he came on my podcast. He didn’t bother being diplomatic. “I don’t know where this idiotic practice got started,” he said. The CEOs running the biggest companies in the world manage their top teams in the room, and he couldn’t see why a £3m to £50m scale-up should settle for less.
His real objection is about how problems actually turn up. Sales misses its number because delivery can’t onboard fast enough, and delivery can’t onboard because hiring is behind. That’s one problem, owned by three people. And a one-to-one discusses it with one of them. Harnish called it “talking in a stovepipe once a week.”
Six private meetings will never solve a problem that lives between three people.
What actually goes wrong in a CEO’s one-to-ones?
Three things, and I suspect you’ll recognise all of them.
You become the only source of accountability
A CEO client once told me about an executive who kept missing his goals. The executive blamed a colleague for holding him up and wanted the CEO to step in. “I’ve told him to go and speak to that person,” the CEO said, as if that settled it.
It didn’t settle anything. The problem was already his, because the only place a difficult conversation ever happened in that business was a one-to-one with him.
You become the therapist
Airbnb’s Brian Chesky put this bluntly in an interview with Fortune: “The one-on-one model is flawed… you become like their therapist.” Think about who sets the agenda. They do. So you hear what they want to talk about, which is rarely what the business needs you to hear.
The monkeys end up on your back
“What happens with one-on-ones is you become the bad guy,” Harnish told me. “The monkeys end up on your back.” Every issue someone raises in private becomes an issue only you own, and you walk out of each meeting carrying more than you walked in with.
And no, the weekly management meeting doesn’t rescue you. A former executive once described the one he’d just escaped: “Dominic. The weekly team meetings were terrible!” Everyone got 20 minutes and spent 19 of them on PowerPoint about their own function. Nobody asked anyone a hard question. They filibustered to the end, then came back the following week and did it again.
“I’ve coached more than 200 founder-CEOs, and the teams that break through all learn the same lesson. You don’t build a leadership team by getting better at managing six individuals. You build one by stopping.”
Dominic Monkhouse, founder of Monkhouse & Company. Scaled Rackspace UK and Peer 1 Hosting as Managing Director. Coached more than 200 founder-CEOs through scaling.
Do the best CEOs really skip one-to-ones?
Yes. And they’re not shy about saying so.
Jensen Huang told a Stanford audience in 2024 that he has 55 people reporting directly to him, in a structure “designed for agility, for information to flow as quickly as possible,” and that he doesn’t hold regular check-ins with them. “Unless they need me,” he said, “then I’ll drop everything for them.” By 2026 it was 60 direct reports, still with no one-on-ones.
Now you might assume that’s about saving time. It isn’t. “They never hear me say something to them that is only for them to know,” he said.
Sit with that for a second, because the opposite is exactly what a private meeting does. The moment one executive knows something the others don’t, you’ve started a pecking order of trust inside your own team. Six executives end up with six slightly different versions of the truth, and you’re the only person who has heard all of them. Nobody meant to build that. It gets built one private meeting at a time.
Mark Zuckerberg runs his top team at Meta the same way, with one caveat worth copying. “When I say I don’t have one-on-ones, I don’t have recurring scheduled one-on-ones,” he said. He talks to his people all the time. He just doesn’t put a standing meeting in the diary to do it.
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What did Verne Harnish see when a CEO cancelled them?
The best story I’ve heard on this came from Harnish.
Doug Brien, co-founder and CEO of the property management company Mynd, had eight direct reports and gave each of them 30 minutes every Friday. That’s four hours a week, at a time when he was lining up a $5 billion home-buying partnership with Invesco. He had better things to do with his Fridays.
Two problems kept coming back to those meetings. The company needed to hire around 200 people a month and wasn’t keeping up. And residents were leaving the properties too fast. Each executive had a perfectly reasonable explanation, delivered privately, once a week.
So they killed the Friday meetings and put in an eight-minute daily huddle instead, from 08:52 to 9am. The head of people now reported three numbers every morning, in front of her peers: open positions, interviews, and offers going out that day. The executive who owned churn reported the last 24 hours of it.
“When she had to report that in front of her peers, not just Doug, she quit in two weeks,” Harnish said. Nobody else in the senior team was surprised. They already knew she wasn’t getting the job done. Churn, meanwhile, got fixed, because the whole team could see the trend every morning and help, rather than leaving it “on the back of Doug the CEO.”
Four hours of Friday meetings became 32 minutes a week.
“The most powerful tool a leader has is peer pressure,” Harnish told me. “And that’s what takes the heat off of you.”
Isn’t Andy Grove’s advice to hold one-to-ones?
It is, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Andy Grove made the one-to-one a cornerstone of how he managed Intel and gave it a whole section of High Output Management. Ben Horowitz went further. In The Hard Thing About Hard Things he describes threatening to fire a manager, and the manager’s boss, unless the manager started holding them. Those are two of the best operators of their generation, and they both believed in the thing I’m telling you to cancel.
But look at who they were writing for. A one-to-one is how a manager stays close to people doing individual work, and that still holds further down your business. I’m not telling your head of sales to stop meeting her account managers.
Your leadership team is a different animal. Its whole job is to make decisions together about problems that cross every function. Manage its members one at a time and you train them to do the opposite.
Why does coaching the team as a team work better?
The research on senior teams is pretty blunt about this. Ruth Wageman, who came on the podcast, spent decades at Harvard and Columbia studying what makes leadership teams great, including more than a hundred senior leadership teams for Senior Leadership Teams, the book she co-wrote. One of the six conditions for team effectiveness she developed with her colleague Richard Hackman is that the team has access to competent coaching focused on the team as a whole, not on its individual members.
That coaching can come from an outside coach. It can also come from you, and it probably should.
Think about how a decent sports team gets ready for a match. They sit down together and watch footage of the opposition. Nobody watches it alone and reports back to the coach on Friday. They work out the plan together, and they answer to each other for how they play it.
“Praise in public, criticise in private” is fine advice for a class of eight-year-olds. It’s the wrong advice for an executive team. Picture an elite athlete who lands a poor long jump. She grimaces, and the first thing she does is turn to her coach and ask what she could have done better. She wants the truth before her next attempt, not a quiet word next week. That’s what high performers want. Kim Scott calls it radical candour, and a closed-door one-to-one is precisely what denies it to them.
So when a behaviour isn’t helping the team win, coach it in the room. You’re talking about the behaviour, not the person, and everyone learns the lesson at once.
If your team has never worked like this, go first. Ask them, in front of each other, what you got wrong on a recent decision, before you ask it of anyone else. Keith Ferrazzi makes the same case in our conversation about moving from leadership to teamship, and it’s the heart of how we run executive leadership team coaching.
What should replace the CEO’s one-to-ones?
A rhythm the team runs together. You swap six private conversations a week, each one a quiet negotiation with you, for one room where the numbers are on the wall and your executives answer to each other.
- A daily huddle. Ten to fifteen minutes at most, same time every day. Each person gives their numbers and answers one question. Ron Friedman’s research on “super teams”, which Harnish pointed me to, boils it down to this: “Where are you stuck?” If you’ve never run one, start with what a daily huddle is and why it matters.
- One weekly leadership meeting against a shared scoreboard, where stuck work gets unblocked and your executives challenge each other rather than waiting for you to do it.
- Individual time on request, not on a schedule. Huang’s rule. Onboarding a new executive, a personal matter, or someone who is struggling and needs to work something through with you first.
Will there be groans? Yes.
I’ll be honest, it’s not only them. There are times when I drop a daily huddle, but the business always moves faster when it’s in place, even now.
And I’ve yet to meet an executive team member who likes daily huddles to begin with. Ask them again once the huddle is just part of the week. And once it’s running, try one more question on them: “Were you an A-player yesterday?” You’ll get blank looks the first time. Then watch what happens when they start answering it for each other.
How do you know your leadership team is strong enough?
Ask every executive two questions, out loud, in the room.
- Who is your number two? Someone who could step into your role within six months.
- Who is their number two? Because if your number two steps up, somebody has to backfill them.
If an executive has five or six direct reports and can’t name one who could replace them, they haven’t built a team. They’ve built a support structure around themselves, and the one-to-one habit is both the cause and the symptom.
When a CEO tells me there’s no headspace for strategy, it’s almost never a calendar problem. It’s a team quality problem, and the one-to-one diary is where it hides.
Then ask yourself the same question. If you disappeared for six months from tomorrow, who would run the company?
If you can’t name them, you don’t have a leadership team. You have a collection of direct reports.
Frequently asked questions
Should CEOs have one-on-ones with their direct reports?
Not as a weekly status meeting with the executive team. Scheduled one-on-ones make the CEO the only source of accountability and keep cross-functional problems in silos. Jensen Huang runs 60 direct reports without them. Hold individual conversations when someone asks for one, and run the leadership team’s rhythm together.
How often should a CEO meet their leadership team?
Daily for ten to fifteen minutes, and weekly for a longer meeting against a shared scoreboard. The daily huddle surfaces where people are stuck while it’s still cheap to fix. The weekly meeting is where the team unblocks cross-functional work and holds each other to account, instead of waiting for your next one-to-one.
What’s wrong with weekly one-to-ones for executives?
They put you in the middle of every issue. Executives negotiate privately, you end up as the bad guy and the therapist, and nobody else learns from the conversation. Almost every serious problem in a scale-up crosses functions, so discussing it with one executive at a time is the slowest possible way to fix it.
Are one-to-ones still useful further down the organisation?
Yes. A manager whose team does individual work, such as account managers or engineers, still gets real value from regular one-to-ones for coaching and development. The argument here is about the executive team, whose job is to make decisions together. Managers copy what they see the executive team do, so fix the top first.
What should a CEO do instead of one-to-ones?
Run a daily huddle, a weekly leadership meeting against a shared scoreboard, and coach behaviour in front of the team. Keep private time for onboarding, personal matters and genuine coaching, on request. Then ask every executive who their number two is. If they can’t answer, that’s the real work.
What should you do next?
If this post has annoyed you slightly, good. The issue is probably not effort. It is design. The business is asking you to carry decisions, standards and exceptions that should now belong inside the team.
The goal is not to disappear. The goal is to build a company where your best work is not dragged back into every operational tangle.
That is the point. Scaling is not adding more people around the same bottleneck. It is rebuilding the business so the bottleneck is removed.
Four ways to take this further
- Book a call. If growth is now making the company slower, heavier or more dependent on you, I can help you decide whether the constraint is people, strategy, execution, cash or your role as founder. No obligation, no pitch. You will know quickly whether this is the right kind of help.
- Grab the book. F**k Plan B covers these principles in more depth, with the practical founder lessons behind customer obsession, honest communication, hiring, small teams and managers who coach.
- Watch: 5 founder mistakes that kill growth. Five founder bottlenecks that quietly stop growth between 50 and 100 people, and how to clear them.
- Subscribe to the newsletter. Get direct, practical thinking on scaling, founder bottlenecks, leadership rhythm and building a company that can run without you in every room.
Your move. Open Slack, Teams or your inbox. Find the decision that should not have come to you this week. That is where the scaling work starts.