Why replace many of your 1:1s with small group check-ins.
Shifting from private alignment to shared ownership can help you build a more integrated team, especially if you and your team are gaining seniority in the organization.
Hello there, it’s Giuseppe here. Welcome to a new post from the Better Leadership newsletter.
There was a time when I felt the calendar filling up with 1:1s meant I was doing things right as a manager. I wanted to be present, supportive, and attentive. I was!
But at some point, presence turned into overload, and support turned into being the go-between for team members who could have just spoken to each other. When a decision needed to be made, people waited for their next 1:1 with me. When a misunderstanding happened, the version I heard depended on who told me first.
So I recently did something that felt a bit radical at first: I stopped most 1:1s.
Not because I stopped caring, but because I wanted to build a system where people didn’t need to rely on me as their first stop for everything.
Instead of constant private alignment, I moved to a model centred on bi-weekly mini-team check-ins and voluntary, more personal sessions.
It’s not a perfect system, but it shifted the way we work together in ways that made us all more effective.
In this article, I want to share with you the lessons that helped me get there, perhaps it’s a useful experience to help you reflect on whether your current setup works or needs adjustments.
Too many 1:1s bear a hidden cost.
On paper, individual check-ins feel like the best way to stay in sync. But when you add them all up across a growing team, you begin to see their side effects:
Siloed alignment: People make decisions with only partial context and assume you will connect the dots for everyone else.
Functional bias: Conversations naturally stay within the boundaries of each person’s role or department.
Decision repackaging: You might find yourself repeating the same context across meetings, often translating or defending decisions made elsewhere.
Power dynamics: Some people grow anxious about who has more “access,” and others start using their 1:1s to lobby ideas privately.
Eventually, you might become the bottleneck for problems you didn’t need to solve.
Cross-functional conversations should be the default, not the exception.
Many decisions live in the grey space between roles.
Collaboration often breaks not because people disagree, but because they never had the same conversation at the same time.
So I started experimenting with what I now call “mini check-ins”:
Small group syncs (3-4 people) that happen bi-weekly
Short agendas centred on current projects, blockers, or shared goals
A rotation of which teams join, depending on the week.
What changed?
Context travels faster, and more people hear the same thing at the same time.
People anticipate cross-impact sooner.
It normalizes mutual responsibility over private ownership.
Instead of information moving vertically and being redistributed sideways, it moves diagonally from the start.
Personal conversations don’t need to disappear, but they do need a purpose.
This shift doesn’t mean removing space for personal reflection or growth. Quite the opposite.
I personally moved to voluntary 1:1s for ad-hoc conversations, and structured quarterly sessions for development.
Voluntary 1:1s allow for deeper check-ins when needed, without the pressure to fill a weekly slot.
Quarterly feedback conversations are longer, prepared in advance, and focused on growth, not updates.
This not only created space for more meaningful dialogue but also increased autonomy. Team members began to self-assess more, ask for feedback when they felt ready, and prepare more thoughtfully for development conversations.
However, in my specific case this works because of the existing transparent relationship we built over years. This might not apply with new joiners in your team, or with people with a big seniority gap compared to you. Be wise in its implementation, on a case by case basis.
Teams grow faster when you’re not the centre of gravity.
Reducing 1:1s can help you delegate more meaningfully. But more importantly, it nudges the team to rely on each other more directly.
What I personally started seeing:
Decisions made without needing my sign-off
More proactive alignment between peers
Less reliance on me as the ultimate validator.
This only worked because the team had matured enough to carry that weight. But even for less experienced teams, some degree of shared accountability can be practiced early.
Let me leave you with a couple of questions to ask yourself, in case you’re feeling overwhelmed by 1:1s or suspect they’re doing less than you hoped:
Are 1:1s the best format for the problems we’re solving?
Where are decisions getting delayed or duplicated?
How often am I the messenger between people who should be speaking directly?
Do people prepare for 1:1s with intention, or just show up to update? (the latter was the standard in my last 1:1s occasions)
What would happen if we tried a group check-in instead?
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. But the answers to these questions might give you some great signals that it’s time to rethink your calendar.
As always, if you liked reading this post, I’d be grateful if you decided to share it with your coworkers, friends, and family, or leave a comment below.
Until next time, have a wonderful day or evening, and see you in the next post!