Meetings should educate, motivate, and develop your people.

The late, great fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld once remarked, “I don’t do meetings.” And if you were Karl Lagerfeld, you didn’t have to. For the rest of us, however, meetings are a part of getting work done, even if they often feel like an interruption of our real work.

No matter what you think of meetings in general, having regular, focused, and productive one-on-one conversations between a manager and her direct reports are vitally important. These meetings are an opportunity to: