The 208-hour habit
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I'd like to share a hunch that's not fully formed, and I'd love your thoughts, so let me set the scene.
As a CEO I used to think a lot about the forces that were creating unnecessary drag across my organisation. And by drag I was looking for places where a lack of clarity existed. My hypothesis was simple: The more clarity you can give your team, the more productive they can be with their attention and effort. This often proved correct, as did the inverse of this idea. Of course, sometimes, where little clarity existed, you could offer scenarios for the team to think through while work was done to achieve clarity so there was rarely a time where the organisation would sit idle waiting for clarity to magically emerge.
One place where a lack of clarity can multiply and cripple your organisation is the 1:1 meeting. I used to walk out of a 1:1 with one of my team having solved something, and before I got back to my desk, usually after several other meetings, I was working out who else needed to hear what had been discussed. Who I would tell, what context they would need first and which version of the story would land with each of them.
A problem had been solved in one meeting. Now I had a second job, which was making sure the solution carried forward into the business.
For years I thought that second job was a big part of leadership. Rehashing a conversation with the people who weren't in the room, finding the right positioning with each of them and communicating the path forward. Some of it landed. Plenty of it did not, and I kept telling myself that the ones that didn't might not have been that important.
When it came to 1:1s with my direct reports, there was also an earlier signal I ignored.
Every so often, one of us would message the other and offer to ‘put the time back in the diary’. We both took it, gratefully. Neither of us ‘missed’ the meeting and I ran that line for the better part of a decade without asking what it might be telling me.
The cost of a room of two
It was only recently that I ran the numbers after hearing other CEOs raising a similar concern.
Think about a CEO with eight direct reports. Meet each of them fortnightly, an hour at a time, and you have booked 208 meetings a year. That is 208 hours, or 5.2 business weeks, spent in a room with one other person.
That's more than a month of your working year, before board meetings, customer visits, hiring or raising capital.
Clearly there's a time cost, but there's also a cost to what those 208 hours do to information inside your business because you have made yourself the single point of transmission.
Every one of those 208 hours is a time when something important gets said in a room of two. Which means every one of them is an occasion when that thing must be said again, somewhere else, by you, with the right level of context for whoever listens to it next.
Some of it gets said again quickly. Some of it waits a lot longer because the next conversation must be scheduled before it can happen. And some of it is never said again, because saying it properly required more effort than either the CEO or the direct report had that week. I think this last category may be the culprit for why momentum stalls in some areas and nobody can work out why.
Then, there is the 1:1 that has no structure. A recurring hour with no agreed format fills with whatever topics is closest to hand, and what is usually closest to hand is how the fortnight has felt. The result? One of the two people ends up counselling the other.
And I'm not the first person to arrive here.
Jensen Huang, the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, told an audience at Stanford in 2024 that he doesn't hold 1:1s at all. “I don't do one-on-ones with any of them,” he said, of a management team of roughly 55 people. His reasoning is about information rather than time. Nothing is ever said to one person that the rest of the company does not hear.
Brian Chesky, the co-founder and chief executive of Airbnb, was more direct during an interview with Fortune. The model is flawed, he said, because it is a recurring hour where the employee owns the agenda, so the two of you often do not discuss the thing that needed discussing, and “you become like their therapist”.
Neither Huang nor Chesky is unreachable. Both were clear that if one of their people needs them, especially when it came to development or there was a personal issue that required privacy, they would drop everything and be there.
An alternative to 1:1s
This is where I’d like your thoughts.
Consider this, and how this might work in your organisation.
Review the next four weeks: Write down what gets discussed in each 1:1. I'm not talking about the agenda you intended, this is about what was discussed. Then sort each item into one of three categories: 1) this needed a group, 2) this needed a document, 3) this needed privacy. You might be surprised at the size of the third category.
Starting week five: Remove the standing 1:1s and replace them with fortnightly team meetings where updates occur and problems get solved in conversations where those who attend are the people who can act on them.
Keep the private conversation intentional: Development, performance, and grievance conversations require privacy. Implement these as quarterly meetings, with named goals and behaviour changes as the milestones. And keep the door open so your people can reach for you when necessary.
The second step is important because removing a meeting without replacing it tends to redistribute the problem rather than solving it.
The Amazon Way
The direct reports meeting is a fortnightly, two-hour conversation where you (as the CEO) host occasionally, not by default, which is also why this format works for any leader with a team.
Everyone posts an update the day before. Half a page, written as prose, with three fields: what changed, what is stuck, and what help is needed from someone in the room.
The host, which changes each meeting (planned in advance and can be swapped if more urgent issues arise) writes a memo which is two to four pages, also written as prose, and captures the following: Context and objective, goals and metrics, state of the business, the proposal, then risks and alternatives. And prose is an important point to emphasise. Writing in sentences forces the person to write for clarity and connect the dots.
If this sounds familiar, this narrative memo was made famous at Amazon.
The memo has a primary and a secondary author, and the secondary author comes from a different function which means the draft will include the perspective of someone with different incentives. This drives stronger partnership dynamics across the leadership team.
The memo should connect to a plan that's already been agreed and include one of two points of discussion. An obstacle, where something in the plan is not surviving contact with reality, and the host cannot clear it alone. Or an opportunity, where something outside the plan is worth changing the plan for. Both need input from the room.
The meeting itself runs in four parts:
25 minutes of quietly reviewing the memo in the room (because asking people to read beforehand means half of them will not)
20 minutes on decisions, built from the third field of the updates shared by each of the team members.
50 minutes on the host's problem, with the CEO speaking last, because if you open with your view, you will get agreement instead of thinking.
25 minutes on the next steps based on the discussion surrounding the memo.
Within 24 hours the host republishes the memo, inclusive of the comments from the team, the decisions and next steps.
This artefact is important and the point of this team meeting design. The context and the decision can travel together throughout the organisation, in the words of the person closest to the problem, without it needing to be rebuilt in six other conversations. A year of those memos is also a fantastic induction document for new executives.
If you go back to the maths, the numbers work like this.
Across eight direct reports, the 1:1s took 416 hours a year (208 hours of CEO time and 208 hours of direct reports time). This new approach takes 468 but your own calendar goes the other way. Your share falls from 208 hours to 52, so you get 156 hours back. The business pays 52 hours. You get 156 back, and decisions get made once, with greater context, instead of multiple times.
Fatigue and distraction
In a world of fatigue and distraction, where leadership expectations are rising, I think there is significant value in reducing decision and communications drag so teams can operate with as much clarity as possible.
Now the numbers might be slightly different for your organisation, but I'd like to know your answers to two questions.
1. Why wouldn't this work in your organisation?
2. What would be the upside if it did?
Before you answer, count the standing 1:1s in your calendar between now and Christmas. How many of those conversations will need to happen a second time, with you in the room, before anything moves?
That’s all for this week, see you next Wednesday.
Phil Hayes-St Clair
CEO Coach
PS If this essay helped, Episode 245: Most Replayed Episode: As a CEO, do you lead a basketball team or a golf team? from my podcast is worth a listen. Tune in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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