My Boss Never Meets with Me-- Should I Care? (Ask Christa S6E64)

Introduction

Hi everyone and welcome to Ask Christa! where I answer listener questions about business challenges and workplace issues. I’m Christa Dhimo and this is episode 64 in Season SIX, and this season focuses on Dealing with Bad Bosses. Remember, most people aren’t prepared to become a manager, and if you’re having issues with YOUR boss, chances are your boss is having issues with THEIR boss, too, and that keeps the bad-boss cycle going.

Today’s episode is about what to do when your boss never meets with you…. Yeah… what boss?

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Listener Question

Here’s the listener question, “I’ve had the same boss for all four years that I’ve worked at my company. He’s not a big meeting guy, and he tells everyone that upfront, but over the last year, he’s barely met with me. He knows I’ll get my work done well and on time, so I think we don’t meet because maybe there’s nothing to talk about, but we went from meeting once a week to him sending a Slack asking if I needed to meet with him, and when I said no, he’d cancel… then he suggested we start meeting every other week, then once a month. 

We also meet as a team once a month. But now the only time I see him is during the team meeting. It’s been eight months. There are plenty of times when I feel like I don’t need to meet with him, and I feel like I get what I need from the team meetings, but then I see my colleagues go in and out of his office, and I’m feeling disconnected. Maybe I’m missing something and I don’t know it. I’m not sure how much I care, though. I don’t want to waste his time or my time with a meeting if we don’t need it. Should I care about never meeting with my boss?”

Meetings, Including with Your Boss, Should Have Purpose

There’s no question that meetings without purpose plague most people during the work day. And for our listener, it could be that you’re doing the right thing by managing your time in a way that feels efficient and purposeful. If you’re getting what you need from the team meetings, then it sounds like that serves a lot of purpose for you, and meeting with your manager would simply duplicate the information and, sure… that’s not a great use of anyone’s time.

But you’re feeling disconnected, and that’s an important part of engagement at work—even if you don’t think of your work as needing your “engagement,” per say, and you’re perfectly fine doing your job then heading home with a square 40 hours (and there’s nothing wrong with that, so don’t believe the bunk about “quiet quitting”), it’s still important to feel and BE connected.

Now, some of you, especially in global teams or matrixed organizations, may only meet with your boss—just you and your boss—on a monthly basis, and that works. Some of you meet on a weekly basis and that works. 

And some of you may NEVER want to meet with your boss, but feel like you have to to stay visible… so I’d say this: meetings should have a purpose to them, and how or when you meet with your boss is no different. The cadence of meeting should serve the purpose. And it’s OK if the purpose is to be sure you continue feeling connected.

Benefits of Meeting with Your Boss

Generally speaking, the cadence or frequency of meeting with your boss is usually tied to your tenure, seniority, and complexity of work or criticality of meeting a deadline with scarce resources.

In all those cases, the purpose of meeting with your boss should be to remain closely tied to status so that your boss can be appropriately informed AND help you remove obstacles QUICKLY. If you’re early in your career, you may not be used to managing some of the common behaviors—such as politics or team members not pulling their weight—that are present in the workplace, and meeting weekly with your manager will help guide you through learning and practicing skills to manage those issues. 

If you’re a well-seasoned executive, you may be used to all kinds of things, but you need to meet with your boss frequently because there’s a highly critical deal that’s about to take place, and you’re informing your board of status every few days, so as an example, meeting with your boss, say the CEO, several times a week and sometimes a few times a day keeps you both aligned and communicating responsibly.

SO: cadence or frequency should have purpose, and so, too, should each meeting. Your boss is there, at least in theory, to enable your success and thereby, enable their success, the team’s success, and the organization’s success.

Other benefits of meeting with your boss?

·       Visibility of your work

·       Nominations for different projects or rewards and recognition

·       Developmental reasons: having them plugged into you more closely often enables them to keep you in mind for management programs and potential promotions

·       Learning is another benefit: you from your boss and your boss from you

·       Helping you through issues with others in the workplace

·       And of course, keeping a healthy, known, connected relationship given the critical nature OF the relationship for both of you

By the way: your cadence or frequency to meet might be more ad-hoc than a regular meeting on the calendar, including a request that, ‘if we haven’t meet in a couple of weeks, let’s just meet to say hi! And stay connected.’ After all, as mentioned earlier, staying connected is a good reason to meet, especially if you’re feeling disconnected. It’s OK if you meet as humans to relate to each other as humans, even if you’re doing a great job and you’re the person your boss never has to worry about.

All of those reasons, and many others, are good reasons and clear benefits to establish a cadence to meet—if in fact you’re able to experience those benefits with your boss. 

Benefits of NOT Meeting with Your Boss

Which leads me to the other side of the spectrum: when there may be little or no benefit to you when it comes to meeting with your boss, and unfortunately, many people experience bosses they prefer not to meet with—just be sure you’re aware of what it might mean for you if you do not have that regular proximity to or connection with your boss. Because if nothing else, meeting with your boss still gives you visibility and at least the chance to determine what gain—even if small—you will get from meeting.

For example, if your boss doesn’t know the details of your day to day because your work is aligned with internal customers and stakeholders, your boss may feel there’s no real need to meet. This usually happens if your manager is a manager on paper, but several other people manage your work with you, like what happens in a matrix organization (you can learn more about that in Episode 19, which I’ll put in the show notes).

But even in more traditional hierarchical organizations, reduced meetings with your manager might happen as you grow and become more senior in your role. But still… you have to meet with your manager at SOME point because there WILL be information and context they need to support you, at SOME POINT—and it will be important that you continue to support them, too.

You Should Care as Much as You Should Care

So… should you care? Maybe… but I drive strategy to make companies work better, so I’m always looking for easy weaknesses to strengthen, and one of them is to have—at minimum—an honest and respectful rapport between employee and manager. An “honest and respectful rapport” means that if the employee is in need because their performance or the company’s performance might be at risk, then they can be honest with the manager at any time and receive what is needed in a respectful way. It also means if the manager is in need because THEIR performance or the company’s performance might be at risk, they can connect with their employees, too, in the same way. 

Strong, functional employee-manager relationships are not just for the benefit of the employee. But in order for them to have benefit, they must have the ability to be honest in a respectful way.

And… they probably shouldn’t happen at the last minute or when the performance is already at risk or worsening… and… that’s when a more regular connection matters.

So… should you care. Yes, to the extent that you know what you need and you value the benefit of meeting, that you understand the reasons behind times when you or your boss might not want to meet, and you’re ready to manage or accept the consequences if you aren’t meeting enough.

Manager-Employee Relationships Matter

I’ll leave you with this: manager and employee relationships matter, so be specific and thoughtful about how you connect with your boss, but also consider what you might need when it comes to how your boss connects with you. In the case of our listener, you might be one of those employees who rarely needs anything: you’re self-driven, you can objectively manage your own performance, you get along great with everyone, you do good work, you have a great reputation. You might be a DREAM employee for your boss, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t meet, nor does it mean you shouldn’t ask your boss to start meeting more regularly again, especially if you’re feeling disconnected. That’s a relationship that matters at work, and it doesn’t sound like there’s tension or toxicity or abuse or any reason NOT to meet other than a sense that your boss needs time to attend to other things, time they would otherwise spend with you.

There’s nothing wrong with doing that now and then, but this relationship matters. It’s long term, it sounds like there’s trust, and it sounds respectful. Let’s make sure it doesn’t become negligent, though, where some of the respect begins to break down then some of the trust erodes. That’s not good for anyone.

So… maybe you should care only to the extent of thinking that you deserve to have a gainful relationship with your boss. You deserve to feel connected. Eight months is a long time, and while you have contact during the team meetings, you probably need more regular contact 1-on-1 than you’re getting. You’ve just learned to adapt, and that typically happens after you learn to tolerate and accept something you feel is inevitable. This isn’t inevitable, though. Get those meetings back on the calendar.

Additional Resources

For your resources, located in the show notes—and there are a few for this episode:

I’ve included information about Leader Member Exchange Theory—now before you hit the snooze button, I’m offering a two minute video from the GreggU YouTube channel that reviews Leader Member Exchange Theory in a bite-sized way. The crux of the theory is related to in-groups and out-groups based on management exchanges, where it’s less about 1:1 relationship between an employee and their manager, and more about how groups within a team may relate to the manager. In our listener question, my answer is related to assuring that if we find ourselves potentially in the out-group because we aren’t meeting as much, we simply need to know the potential consequences. Now, my only issue with this video is that it mentions a manager may punish an outgroup, but “punish” is a big and powerful word. The Leader-Member Exchange Theory supports the idea that the out-group won’t have as many gains, though, and that’s what’s important to know about the theory. 

For those of you who like to geek out about organizational research, I also included an interesting paper from Aggarwal et al published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2020. It’s called, “Leader–Member Exchange, Work Engagement, and Psychological Withdrawal Behavior: The Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment” Read the Abstract and Introduction, then then the Discussion. If you want to get nerdy, read the Hypothesis Development sections also. The paper will offer deeper insights into what may in fact happen to both the employee and the manager when their connection is weakened over time.

I’ve also included some information about meeting with your boss: the first is from Rogelburg et al. published in Harvard Businses Review in April 2024. It’s listed for subscribers, but you can join for free. 

If you don’t want the hassle, I’ve also included an easy to review article from the Indeed Editorial Team called, 12 ways to ensure a successful meeting with your boss.” It was published in December 2025, and includes tips on how to setup for different types of meetings, topics, the structure of the meeting, and ways to be polite and respectful, which ALWAYS goes a long way with good humans.

Since we talked about matrix and hierarchical organizations, I also included the link to Episode 19 of Ask Christa! which quickly reviews the different organizational structures, if it’s helpful.

Wrap Up & Submitting Your Question

And that’s a wrap for Episode 64 as we continue season six focused on Dealing with Difficult Bosses. Please like and subscribe here, but why not send in a question? Go to my site, AskChrista.com, that’s Christa with a C-H and click on Submit Your Question. You’ll also see other episodes there, listed by category and season, and every season has a theme. And sign up for my More Answers newsletter to get quick tips and resource boosts for the workplace.

As always, thank you for your support. And remember, if you have a business challenge or a workplace issue—Ask Christa!