What is a skip-level meeting?
Definition
A skip-level meeting is a conversation between an employee and their manager's manager, without the direct manager present.
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A skip-level meeting skips one layer of management.
A senior manager meets people two levels down, without the direct manager in the room. It can be one person at a time or a small group, and it usually happens every few months. A one-on-one, by contrast, runs weekly or every two weeks between a manager and a direct report.
Your skip-level reports are the people two levels below you. The meeting is your conversation with them.
Two meetings, two jobs
One-on-one
Manager and direct report
- Weekly or every two weeks
- The work, the obstacles and growth
Skip-level meeting
Employee and their manager's manager
- Every few months
- Problems people will not raise with their own manager
People say things here that they will not say to their manager.
It surfaces the problems people will not raise with the person who causes them, which is exactly the class of problem that ends in a resignation.
It also gives the senior manager a direct read on how a team is being managed, which is otherwise hard to get. Turnover is often local to one manager, and this is one of the few ways to see it early.
A good skip-level meeting follows a few rules.
- Tell the direct manager it is happening and why, so it never feels like an investigation.
- Ask open questions and listen more than you talk.
- Keep what you hear confidential unless the person agrees to share it.
- Follow up on what you said you would do, or the next meeting will be silent.
These questions tend to get honest answers.
- What is one thing that would make your work easier?
- What do you think leadership does not see about this team?
- Do you have what you need to grow here?
- Have you raised something before that nothing happened about?
What you do afterwards decides whether people speak up again.
Look for the theme that comes up in more than one conversation: a process that wastes time, a priority nobody understands, a manager who cancels one-on-ones. Bring themes back to the manager, never names, and say what you will change.
The time cost is small. Take an invented director with 4 managers and 24 skip-level reports. Meeting each of the 24 for 30 minutes twice a year is 24 hours a year, or 2 hours a month.
These are the common mistakes with skip-level meetings.
- Using it to check up on the direct manager, which turns it into an investigation.
- Running it once and never again.
- Repeating what someone said to their manager without permission.
- Collecting problems and fixing none of them.
These related terms are in the glossary too.
A one-on-one is a recurring private conversation between a manager and a direct report about the work, the obstacles and the person's growth.
A stay interview is a structured conversation with a current employee about what keeps them here and what would make them consider leaving.
An exit interview is a structured conversation with a departing employee about why they are leaving and what would have changed their mind.
A toxic work environment is a workplace where the day-to-day norms, usually set by managers, reliably damage the people in it.
Employee engagement is how committed and involved people are in their work and their company, beyond simply doing the tasks assigned to them.
Regretted attrition is a departure the company did not want: someone whose performance, skills or relationships you would have paid to keep.
These pages on this site go deeper.
Back to the HR glossary, where all 52 terms are defined.