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A client of mine, Melissa, the CEO of a tech company in the healthcare sector, vented to me about a conversation she’d had with her CHRO, Ben. He came to her and said, “I’m hearing frustrations on the team about how decisions are getting made.” Having prided herself on being a transparent, inclusive leader (which she is), she was perplexed. Ben went on to share several stories of team members who’d learned about critical decisions that affected them from their peers, not from Melissa. For example, the VP of engineering learned about a deprioritized product feature from the VP of marketing. The VP of quality learned about a new project to accelerate product delivery from the VP of operations. The VP of sales learned about a new budget shift from the CFO.
Melissa explained to me that, indeed, based on new information that each of those executives had brought in their 1:1s, she supported their recommended decisions, and assumed they would loop in the requisite peers rather than waiting for the next monthly executive meeting. In her mind, she was empowering her team to accelerate needed decisions rather than being the bottleneck or playing messenger to the other VPs, thus slowing things down. Clearly her focus on efficiency blinded her to the disunity and conflict it might provoke on the team. In each case, she’d only gotten part of the story.
I gave her the advice I’ve given countless CEOs and C-suite leaders: Stop having so many 1:1 meetings.
The Hidden Costs of Executive 1:1 Meetings
In most large organizations, a typical CEO’s or senior executive’s calendar is clogged with 1:1 meetings. These are usually seen as necessary for alignment, decision-making, or relationship management. But at the top of an enterprise, the very structure of these meetings is working against the organization’s best interests. While there’s lots of information available about how to optimize or improve your 1:1 meetings, no amount of improvement will help meetings that shouldn’t be happening in the first place.
Lower in the organization, 1:1 meetings serve different purposes that may make more sense when people are guiding middle managers, supervisors, or individual contributors. But here’s the counterintuitive truth: The more 1:1 meetings senior executives have, the more fragmented and functionally siloed the organization can become.
It might be easy to conclude that Melissa should have known better not to assume her functional VPs had consulted with key peers impacted by their decisions, or that she simply should have said, “Before we move ahead, why don’t you loop John in to make sure this doesn’t cause any issues for him.” Fair enough. But even if that had happened, it wouldn’t entirely eliminate the challenges of fragmentation caused by executive 1:1s. And worse, it may have led to five additional meetings she would have had to referee.
At the executive level, no meaningful decision exists in a vacuum. As was the case with Melissa’s team, what the engineering VP does is significantly impacted by a decision the VP of marketing makes. The VP of operations’ decision had significant implications for the VP of quality. Yet Melissa’s meetings with those key leaders resulted in decisions—and assumptions—that others didn’t hear, couldn’t weigh in on, or later had to be retroactively briefed about. There was no intended malice or attempt to usurp others’ influence. Just the natural centrifugal force of a myopic view of the world through one’s own function or region.
This creates four core problems:
Fragmented governance
Each 1:1 functions like a mini steering committee, but with no one else in the room. Governance becomes informal and duplicative, requiring rework and follow-up meetings just to keep others up to speed. Worse, viewpoints that weren’t considered in the initial 1:1 then surface later on, leading to friction that could have been avoided. When too much time is spent in fragmented meetings, there’s little left for the work that only senior leaders can do: stewarding enterprise priorities, developing talent, and advancing culture.
Functional bias
One-on-ones reinforce a view of the organization as a set of departments rather than a web of capabilities. Over time, this strengthens silos instead of creating cross-functional coherence. And it forces the CEO or senior leader to act as the sole integrator of cross-functional perspectives.
Decision repackaging
Executives waste valuable time repeating, translating, or defending decisions made privately. This not only slows momentum—it breeds misalignment and friction downstream. Trust erodes over time, and leaders become conditioned to use their 1:1s to game the system and distort the truth to ensure their views prevail.
Executive rivalry and collusion
Succession overhang and ambition can subtly foster competition among top leaders. One-on-ones become arenas for inside influence, where leaders can imply advantage by referencing private access (“In my 1:1 with Bill this morning…”), creating a sense of secrecy and status that erodes collective trust.
CEOs can also be guilty of leveraging their 1:1s to extract information about other team members, creating a false sense of “insider intimacy” with direct reports that ultimately undermines psychological safety. One CEO I urged to reduce his 1:1s actually lamented to me, “But how will I get all of the inside scoops I don’t get anywhere else?”
A Better Way to Use Executives’ Time: Capability Meetings
The alternative is to re-engineer the way executive time is used. Instead of relying on 1:1s for operational discussions, CEOs and senior executives should convene small, cross-functional “capability meetings”—1:2 or 1:3 conversations that reflect how value is actually created.
For example, innovation isn’t owned by R&D, marketing, or customer experience alone; it lives in the seams between them. Bringing those leaders together—at the same table—ensures strategic clarity, accelerates coordination, and strengthens shared ownership.
Here are five ways to begin:
Reserve 1:1s for development.
Shift 1:1s to a quarterly cadence and use them solely for the individual’s growth, feedback, and career development. These conversations deserve focused, undivided attention—not to be diluted by operational updates or real-time firefighting.
You can block 90-minute quarterly sessions that are clearly labeled “development conversation.” Structure them around reflection, feedback, and future goals. Avoid sliding into tactical issues. Use prompts like “What are you learning about yourself as a leader this quarter?” or “What would stretch you in a meaningful way next year?”
At one global consumer goods company, the COO redesigned her 1:1 structure by implementing a “career check-in” model: quarterly sessions focused entirely on each direct report’s long-term goals, with zero slides or project updates. This shift dramatically improved retention and succession visibility within her team.
Convene around capabilities.
Map out your enterprise’s most critical capabilities like innovation, digital transformation, or customer loyalty, and structure standing meetings around the cross-functional intersections that enable them.
Identify the five to seven capabilities that create differentiated value in your business. For each, bring together the two to four functions most essential to delivering that value. These “capability councils” become the forums for near-term decision-making, trade-offs, and shared execution, saving the full executive team’s time for truly enterprise-wide strategies and opportunities.
Melissa worked with her team to reframe their strategic priorities into capability areas—like “virtual care experience” and “clinical operations technologies”—and created standing 1:3 capability meetings that included product, operations, and engineering leaders. As a result, go-to-market cycles shortened by 20%, and duplication and friction across teams dropped significantly.
Ensure the right people are listening.
One of the quiet inefficiencies of 1:1s is that they pull decisions into private channels, where the people most affected often aren’t present. That means leaders have to replay discussions for others later, or relitigate decisions once new information surfaces, leading to misunderstanding, misalignment, or delayed action.
You can use capability meetings to bring together the specific leaders whose functions intersect around a given issue. This ensures that the people who need to understand and act on the information are hearing it at the moment it matters. No one has to wait to be briefed later. This kind of targeted presence builds sharper shared judgment and eliminates the need to re-translate decisions across silos.
At a financial services firm I’ve consulted with, the CEO replaced many of his 1:1s with capability meetings like “go to market,” “operational efficiency,” or “enterprise talent,” convening various combinations of the heads of risk, compliance, sales, and human resources, as well as the business unit general managers, to discuss capability-focused topics. Because the right people were hearing the context in real time, execution accelerated. Leaders no longer had to “sell” decisions afterward or decipher what had happened behind closed doors because they were in the room when it happened.
Elevate executive team time.
When too many decisions happen in private 1:1s, full executive team meetings often devolve into catch-up sessions, replaying decisions, clarifying miscommunications, or managing interpersonal fallout. That robs the team of the chance to focus on the truly enterprise-wide work only they can do.
By using capability meetings to handle cross-functional execution and trade-offs at the right level, executive team time can be reserved for strategic sensemaking, cultural stewardship, and long-horizon bets. Center agendas around questions like “What are the few issues that require the full weight of this team?” or “Where does our system need realignment?”
One Fortune 100 company overhauled its monthly executive team meeting after realizing that too much time was spent relitigating decisions made elsewhere. By reassigning operational decision-making to triads tied to core capabilities, they cleared the decks for their senior team to focus on systemic enterprise priorities—like cultural resilience, the innovation pipeline, scenario planning for disruptions, and global portfolio shifts. The result was faster execution at the edges and deeper strategic coherence at the center.

翻译考点：
考点1： "vented"应该译为“透露”。
考点2： "VP"应译为“副总监”。
考点3：" functionally siloed"应译为“职能孤岛化”。
考点4： "Fragmented governance"应译为“碎片化治理 ”。
考点5： 'game the system"应译为“钻制度的空子”。
考点6： "Succession overhang"应译为“继任问题带来的潜在影响”。
考点7："cleared the decks"应译为“扫清障碍”。