> it's a relationship where both parties gain something.
For the vast majority of employed people, what they gain is the ability to continue to afford food and shelter.
Most jobs do not afford the economic reality necessary to allow the employee a position of being able to afford to bargain as anything approaching an equal.
It is not a strange way to look at the world for anyone who has lived for any significant amount of time as a worker in any average job. It is helpless, yes.
If your boss is taking the time to give you a 1-on-1, then there is an opportunity for both sides to listen to each other.
If you have problems/complaints and you never say anything about them, then don't be surprised if they never change.
If there is a 1-on-1 meeting happening, then a communication channel is open. I suppose you can choose to cynically shut it again, but if you make that choice, then don't be surprised to find that you don't have a voice.
A person could try hard to avoid being the squeaky wheel. They could take no curiosity about themselves, or their surroundings, or their organization's goals, or how their boss sees them, or how others see them, or how their habits affect their work, and basically stay the same for years on end, doing the same job, at basically the minimum quality and execution to stay employed.
And then "at the next round of layoffs" that person will find themselves surprisingly replaceable. Probably by a cheaper, more junior person who can do the exact same work at the exact same minimum quality. No reason to keep the guy who hasn't improved for years, and basically tells you to F-off any time you ask him how you can help him.
Guess what: Being invested in your work can make you more valuable. The cynical route often doesn't pay, and frequently fulfills itself.
It's also often true that 1-on-1's are people doing something they are required to do, targeted at quota fulfillment, where there's not actually an opportunity for either side to influence a situation at all because it's just a big chain of fulfilling requests from higher up a chain.
I had mandatory 1-on-1s at a call center doing outbound cold calls for things like FoP fundraisers, a job that couldn't actually be done cheaper legally, where the organization didn't have goals other than maximizing profit, where no one I interacted with were anything but cynical about the job and where there wasn't value to be found in getting more invested in it. My managers were explicit about them being bullshit mandatory 1-on-1s mostly geared at pressuring employees to close more.
I agree, some of the negativity I'm seeing about 1:1's seems to come from 1:1's not being useful, or even being a negative thing, but the person complaining about it seems to put all the blame on the other person in the 1:1. "My manager doesn't really want me to bring up anything", etc. Which I'm sure is true sometimes. But in my experience, you really can't ever be 100% certain that that's true, but if you just assume that it's true and you act accordingly, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There ars a lot of things in life that are like this, IME. There's a cynical or pessimistic way to look at something (often an interpersonal thing), and if you assume that it's true, then whether or not it was true, it becomes true for you. In those cases, the only rational thing to do is act as if it weren't true.
Example: incels. Lots of people have rough lives and have a hard time developing socially in all kinds of different ways. It sucks. Sometimes that leads to guys who have a fundamentally hard time interacting with women they are attracted to, which can lead to downward spirals of rejection and misery. Some guys cope with this by becoming incels or redpillers or whatever. "Girls don't like me, I'm so sad" is transformed into "Girls don't like me because girls suck and society sucks and it makes me awesome". It's really depressing, but there's a rationality to it in that it trades pain for anger without changing the situation. But even if someone isn't an actual incel type, once they assume that identity and start to believe it, they'll become one, which is why it never does anyone any good to start thinking of themselves as incels or redpillers. But this isn't just about incels. There are innumerable self-fulfilling, self-destructive viewpoints out there, in which even if they're rooted in elements of truth, it doesn't do anyone any good to accept the viewpoint.
Other examples include the Golden Rule, taking the high road, etc. EDIT: meaning, the notion that the Golden Rule or taking the high road all the time is for suckers, therefore you shouldn't do it. It assumes the worst in people, and if you live your life that way it ensures that you have bad interactions with people that reaffirm your already-cynical viewpoint.
But, uh, I may have gone off on some tangents there. Sorry HN. TL;DR even if your 1:1's with your boss suck, don't give up on trying to make them more constructive.
I will assume the worst in a manager if they haven't gone out of their way to disprove the notion.
They have both the authority and hopefully the management / people skills to be the one to stick their neck out and say "Hey, let's make this team be one that's honest and tries to actually create value for the company, not just keep our heads down and try to look good".
Being the young optimist who insists that everyone in the company tries to do the right thing is not smart unless management is making it clear that this is what they want.
That just makes it sound like your company has terrible recruiting. If it's not true, you're creating your own problems. If it is true, get out, obviously.
> If your boss is taking the time to give you a 1-on-1, then there is an opportunity for both sides to listen to each other.
Naw, there's an opportunity for your boss to divide & conquer, and for you to screw over your coworkers for short-term gain. You might not _think_ you're doing that — the way it's designed it's very easy for both sides to not think that — but that's the actual dynamic of the situation.
This is why the much-maligned "do not negotiate individually" rule many unions have exists. And 1-on-1s are pretty much just that, only wrapped up in some friendly-sounding woo.
> And then "at the next round of layoffs" that person will find themselves surprisingly replaceable.
> Guess what: Being invested in your work can make you more valuable.
Experience having survived lay-offs: lol, no. Nobody puts a rating on your rants.
I gotta agree that I feel the same way. I've survived layoffs where I pretty much saw all the "most valuable" people (plus one or two people who we probably shouldn't have hired in the first place) laid off while us underpaid suckers got to keep our jobs. Layoffs are a cost saving measure and unless you're cheap to retain or have built up too much of a "bus factor" around your skillset, your work is probably not good enough to save you. Someone with 15% less skill and 30% less pay will replace it.
> "Most jobs do not afford the economic reality necessary to allow the employee a position of being able to afford to bargain as anything approaching an equal."
And that is a big problem. This means it's not a free market. Power is unevenly divided, and you only operate on the job market at the mercy of the other party. This is bad.
Something is needed to even the playing field and make employers and employees equals in these negotiations, whether that's unionisation, Basic Income, worker protections of some sort, or something else.
It is, for the vast majority of employed people.
> it's a relationship where both parties gain something.
For the vast majority of employed people, what they gain is the ability to continue to afford food and shelter.
Most jobs do not afford the economic reality necessary to allow the employee a position of being able to afford to bargain as anything approaching an equal.
It is not a strange way to look at the world for anyone who has lived for any significant amount of time as a worker in any average job. It is helpless, yes.