Body of Knowledge · Glossary
One-on-one
The recurring, protected meeting between a manager and a report. It belongs to the report and is not for status. Blockers, frustrations, growth and the earliest signs of disengagement come up here. With a manager as the report, it becomes a judgment debrief.
Where the standard develops it
- PL-5Career development and growth pathsOne-on-ones, promotions, the Staff+ track, and the IC/manager choice.
- PL-6Leading through leadersSelecting, developing, and holding accountable the managers who report to you.
Related terms
- Key-person risk
- Critical capability, context or ownership concentrated in one person, so that the organisation is destabilised when they leave or are courted.
- Readiness
- Already exercising the judgment of a larger scope on real stakes before holding the title.
- Succession
- A ready or nearly ready successor for every key role, the executive's own included, treated as an explicit expectation of senior roles and not as a personal virtue.
- Calibration
- Aligning evaluation standards across interviewers, managers or organisations so that the same capability or performance earns the same judgment.
- Disengagement signals
- Withdrawal, cynicism and ideas that stop coming.
- Glue work
- The coordinating, documenting and unblocking work that holds a team together and rarely shows up in the artifacts a promotion process values.
- Growth ladder
- An explicit description of what each level looks like for each competency, so that a promotion is judged against a shared description rather than against how assertive a manager is.
- Judgment debrief
- The form a one-on-one with a manager takes.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). One-on-one. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.one-on-one). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/one-on-one