A One-on-One Meeting Agenda Your Report Writes, Not You

Of everything in a one-on-one, I think who owns the agenda matters most. If you write it, you decide what gets talked about, and your report learns to bring answers to your questions instead of the thing that is actually in their way. At that point it is a status meeting. Rogelberg puts a weekly 30-minute one-on-one at around 25 hours a year per person. That’s a lot of hours to spend going through your own list.

Before the meeting: two lists, written separately

Both of you write your topics down before you meet, in the same shared doc, in separate sections. Neither of you edits the other’s list. This is close to what Rogelberg recommends: each person makes their own list, and the direct report works through theirs first.

Separate matters more than it looks. If your report can see your topics while writing theirs, they will start trimming their list to fit around yours. Ask for their list by the evening before, so you read it before you walk in, not during.

It is also less work for you, and managers have less spare energy than they used to. In Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026, only 22% of managers were engaged in 2025, a five-point drop in a single year. Handing the prep to your report takes one thing off your plate.

Minutes one to five: their list goes first

Open with their first item. Not a catch-up, not “how’s the week”, not your urgent thing. If what you have is truly urgent, it shouldn’t have waited for the one-on-one anyway.

The first item on their list tells you what is taking up the most room in their head. Sometimes it’s a work problem. Sometimes it’s a person. Sometimes it’s a question they have been holding for a week because there was no other slot to ask it. Whatever it is, it gets the first five minutes, and you mostly listen.

Keep a quiet check on yourself. If you’ve done more than half the talking, you are outside the 50 to 90% range that Rogelberg’s work points to, and the meeting has drifted back to being yours.

The middle: problems arrive with a proposed fix

The rest of their list comes next, and one rule makes this part work. Every problem arrives with “here is what I would do”. It doesn’t need to be the right answer. It needs to be an answer.

I like this rule because it changes your job in the room. Without it, you’re solving. With it, you’re reacting to a proposal, which is faster, and you get to see how your report thinks, which you never see if you jump straight to your own fix. Most of the time the right response is “that works, go ahead”.

The rule only holds if your reaction to a problem is the same every week. If a problem raised early gets a sharper response than one raised late, your report will learn to raise them late. There’s a longer case for why predictable leaders get told the truth sooner, and this is where it pays off.

Your own topics come after theirs, in whatever time is left. Some of them will already have come up.

The last five minutes: one development question

Close with one question about their growth, not their week. “Where do you want to be stronger by March?” “What kind of work would you like more of?” Ask it, listen, and don’t try to solve it in the same meeting.

This is the part that gets cut first when time runs short, and it’s the part that makes the meeting worth having. In a Gallup study of nearly 15,000 employees, only 16% said the last conversation with their manager was extremely meaningful. The same Gallup piece reports that 80% of employees who received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged. Five minutes on a real question each week is a cheap way to make your next conversation one of the meaningful ones.

If you’re new to running a team, the first-time marketing manager playbook covers the rest of the job. This piece is only about who owns the agenda.

After: two lines each, written the same day

Each of you adds two lines to the shared doc before the day ends: what we agreed, and what I owe. No minutes, no summary deck.

Next week’s meeting starts with a ten-second look at those lines. If something you owed is still open, say so before they have to ask. It’s a small, boring system, which is exactly the kind running marketing like an operator argues for.

The 30-minute agenda, ready to copy

Paste this into a shared doc, one per report. They fill in their section by the evening before.

On cadence, keep it short and keep it fixed. Rogelberg’s summary says the science is most aligned with a weekly or every-other-week rhythm, and Gallup found that 15- to 30-minute conversations have a greater impact than 30- to 60-minute ones if they happen regularly. Protecting the slot is the hard part. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, as reported by Business Today, counted about 275 interruptions a day and found 60% of meetings are ad hoc. A recurring 30 minutes that never moves is rarer than it should be. Going by Gallup’s finding, a short meeting that happens every week is worth more than a long one that gets pushed every other time.

Questions to keep in your back pocket

Your report owns the agenda, but some weeks their list will be thin. These are for those weeks, grouped by what each set tends to bring out.

When you need to know what’s in the way

• What’s taking longer than it should right now?
• What are you waiting on from someone else, including me?
• If you had to drop one thing this week, what would it be?

When you suspect something isn’t being said

• What’s one thing about your work you think I don’t know?
• Which decision have you been sitting on?

When you want to talk about growth

• What part of your work would you like more of six months from now?
• Which skill would make next quarter easier?
• Whose work would you like to learn from?
• What’s something you’d like to try that nobody has asked you to do?

When you want feedback on yourself

• What should I stop doing in these meetings?
• Where did I slow you down this month?
• What do you need from me that you’re not getting?

In your last one-on-one, whose list did the first ten minutes come from?