Your Managers Are Meeting, Not Coaching.

I pulled the feedback data for 31 managers last week. Everyone had active 1:1 calendars. 29 of them had given zero documented feedback in 30 days.

Seven feedback entries total. Across a 150-person company. 1.4% participation.

The calendar view said "healthy management culture." The data was saying something else entirely.

If your managers are holding 1:1s but producing no coaching artifacts, they're not managing. They have the title. That's about it.

1:1 frequency is a vanity metric

Every People team I've worked in tracks 1:1 completion rates. It feels nice because it's measurable and binary: did the meeting happen, yes or no? Super.

But it measures input, not output. A manager can hold 50 one-on-ones in a month and produce exactly nothing that develops their team. No feedback documented. No performance concern raised. No coaching observation written down. The meeting happened, so the dashboard stays green.

The dangerous part is that 1:1 frequency creates a story of health. When a senior leader asks "how are our managers doing?", the People team pulls the calendar data and says "95% 1:1 completion rate." Everyone nods. Nobody asks what happened in those meetings.

The blank scorecard problem

IMO performance reviews don't fail at review time. They fail in the six months before, when nobody is collecting evidence.

A manager who meets weekly but never documents a coaching observation, a developmental nudge, or a performance concern is building a blank scorecard. When review season arrives, they write from memory. Memory can be generous. It smooths over the concerns they should have raised previously. The difficult conversation they avoided in March becomes "met expectations" in September.

This behaviour cannibalises your high-performance culture.

The cost isn't just a bad review cycle. It’s company degradation. It's the six months of development that didn't happen. The performance concern that festered because nobody named it. The high performer who got the same rating as the person coasting beside them, and noticed.

The proxy trap: agenda edits are not coaching

My first instinct when I found this pattern was to think, “surely not! I’ve missed something, let’s dig deeper.” I looked for proxy signals. Maybe the feedback was happening just not in the formal tool. Maybe it was in the 1:1 agenda itself.

So I anonymised & audited the agenda content for the managers with the highest engagement scores. Luckily our tool has a Claude MCP so I never had to go in and access data directly, in fact, you can’t. 1:1 content is even protected from admins. However the MCP anonymised and surfaced talking points to Claude, who built me a snapshot. Some had hundreds of edits per month. That looked promising. Until I read what they were actually writing.

Status updates. Tech Ops rota discussion. Budget sign-off. Probation deadline reminders. Linking to Jira tickets. PTO Planning. Recruitment pipeline reviews.

Each agenda was an operational list, not a coaching conversation. The managers were using their 1:1s as status meetings to align on BAU stuff.

This is the rule I now apply: the more an activity metric looks like it measures coaching, the more dangerous it is. Agenda edits look like preparation. Slack message volume looks like collaboration. Meeting count looks like cadence. Each creates a story that obscures the real question: is this manager developing their people?

What the data actually looks like

This is what it looked like when I built the leaderboard. Two managers had given feedback. One had hit the target. The other was below. Twenty-nine managers, including some with teams of eight, had given zero. The total feedback count for the entire company: seven.

The gap is adoption, not coaching quality. I knew the build had to drive behaviour from near zero.

In the UK this matters beyond culture: if you ever need to move someone into a formal performance process and have no prior coaching record, you are starting from scratch in a jurisdiction where procedural fairness is a legal requirement, not a preference. The absence of documented feedback is both a development gap and an employment law exposure. In the UK (and any other jurisdiction I’m familiar with), procedural fairness is a legal requirement.

Why the platform alone won't fix it

The performance tool we use is awesome, no hate. But it doesn’t drive outcomes fully, on its own. It logs feedback. It can show you how much was given. What it cannot do is publish a ranking, hold a manager to a target, or alert when someone falls behind. It tracks, but it can't drive autonomously.

The options I considered and rejected: screen-scraping (brittle, breaks on every UI update), agent-only logging (undercounts real usage because it misses everything managers give outside the AI tool), manual weekly exports (someone has to remember to pull it). None of them run themselves.

The approach I settled on: pull directly from the platform's API, join it to the org chart from the HRIS, score each manager against a per-report target, anonymise the output to counts only, and make it visible it in two places. A live dashboard and a weekly slack message to our #managers channel. No feedback content leaves the platform. The agent never sees what was said. It sees only that feedback was given, to whom, and how often. We also pull a native feedback-richness score directly from the Performance tool. I’m thinking about ways to play with and optimise this, because rich feedback signal is the actual goal.

What I am building

This runs every Monday, unattended, after a one-time approval. The agent pulls the data, joins it to the org structure, scores each manager against their target, and sends the digest. The dashboard refreshes itself. No per-run prompts.

Who models and who mandates, matters

One thing the data surfaced that I didn't expect: the person responsible for coaching managers on feedback had given zero feedback in 30 days. They were running the adoption initiative while not adopting it.

I’m long enough in the tooth and/or cynical enough to know, this is not unusual. It is the norm. People teams launch feedback cultures and forget to check whether they are the first adopters. We’ve all seen it, inside People or not. A shiny new programme or initiative, 6 months later it’s dead.

Before you hold anyone accountable for a new standard, make sure the People function is the most visible example of it.

But imo modelling only gets you so far. It needs to be a mandate.

The most robust version of this I've seen operates at the executive level, built into how performance itself is assessed. In the QuantumLight framework, used by Revolut at 6,000+ employees where feedback given is a scored dimension of a manager's own performance review. That's the difference. If you don't coach, your own rating reflects it. The leaderboard stops being a transparency tool and becomes an accountability mechanism with teeth.

That shift requires one thing: a CEO who has decided that coaching is a delivery expectation, not a culture initiative. Feedback drives performance. When direction comes from the top and is measured the same way as shipping product, the adoption problem will largely solve itself.

The system I am building gets the data visible. But the executive mandate is what drives it home.

What to do about it