The Most Important Meeting Leaders Are Cutting Right Now

Initially published on Forbes February 5, 2026

In recent months, a growing number of executives have proudly announced they are cutting back on one-on-one meetings. The logic sounds compelling. Calendars are overloaded. Focus time is scarce. Efficiency has become the dominant management currency. If meetings are the problem, fewer meetings must be the solution.

But meetings are not the problem. The wrong meetings are the problem.

Why Most Meetings Exist in the First Place

Status update meetings, information sharing, alignment theater and recurring check-ins exist largely because asynchronous communication systems are broken or unclear. These meetings fill calendars because people don’t know where to look. Where the latest decision was written down. Where the real version of the work lives. Whether something changed since yesterday. Who knows what, and who is supposed to act.

So instead of searching, guessing, or risking being wrong, they call a meeting.

Meetings become a safety net. If everyone is in the room at the same time, no one can say they missed something. No one has to hunt through documents, threads, or tools. The meeting becomes the place where work happens.

Those meetings should disappear. Not be shortened. Not optimized. Removed entirely.

What One-On-One Meetings Are Actually For

One-on-one meetings do not belong in that category.

One-on-ones exist because humans need them.

In a recent conversation on The Future of Less Work, Dr. Rebecca Hinds, an organizational researcher, founder of the Work AI Institute at Glean, and author of Your Best Meeting Ever, outlined a clear test for deciding whether a meeting is necessary. According to Hinds, “a meeting should only exist if the purpose is to decide, debate, discuss, or develop yourself or your team.” Status updates and information exchange fail that test.

Even then, meetings need to earn their place. Hinds argues that live conversations make sense when issues are complex and ambiguous, when emotions or trust must be managed in real time, or when decisions are difficult to reverse. Most meeting agendas don’t meet those conditions. The work that belongs in one-on-one meetings does.

Manager one-on-ones exist because they provide a reliable human channel where context is shared, expectations are clarified, concerns surface early, trust is built and judgment is shaped over time. One-on-ones are where managers learn what their people are dealing with before it shows up as a problem, where misalignment is caught early, and where motivation, confidence and focus are recalibrated.

They are not there to move work faster. They are there to make better work possible.

This distinction matters even more now.

Why One-On-Ones Matter More as AI Takes Over Tasks

As organizations implement AI, leadership attention has understandably shifted toward efficiency. Leaders are looking at tasks that can be automated, agents that can execute faster, workflows that can be compressed. The promise of AI is that it frees up time by taking over execution, reporting and coordination work.

But that time was never meant to disappear. It was meant to be reinvested.

Under pressure to show speed and productivity, leaders often reach for the most visible and easiest meetings to cut. One-on-ones are recurring, predictable and clearly marked on the calendar. Status meetings, by contrast, feel culturally entrenched and politically harder to remove. As a result, organizations eliminate the conversations that compound value over time while preserving the ones that simply circulate information.

This inversion has consequences.

One-on-one meetings are one of the few remaining places where human leadership actually happens. They are where managers help employees interpret ambiguity, make sense of competing priorities, reflect on decisions, and adjust course. They are where trust is built and psychological safety is reinforced. They are where people learn how to think, not just what to do.

As AI absorbs execution, synthesis and routine decision support, the relative value of these conversations increases. Judgment, context, emotional awareness, coaching and sense-making become the differentiators. Cutting one-on-ones while automating everything else removes one of the few mechanisms people have to adapt in an AI-driven workplace.

It also sends a powerful signal.

Canceling one-on-ones tells employees that human attention is optional. Protecting them sends the opposite message — that judgment, growth and human connection still matter here. In flatter, hybrid organizations where authority is increasingly informal, these signals shape culture faster than any leadership statement.

And this will only matter more over time.

As AI becomes ubiquitous, the real differentiator will not be who automated faster, but whose human operating system works better: the judgment, relationships and ways of working that make an organization uniquely valuable.

So yes, status update meetings should move out of meetings entirely. Information sharing should default to asynchronous communication with a clear source of truth. Decision meetings should be shorter and more deliberate.

And one-on-one meetings should be protected precisely because they are inefficient by design.

Efficiency has its place.

Human work requires something else entirely.