How do you run a skip-level meeting?

That meeting can be far more useful. Here is how to run one that people actually talk in.

What is a skip-level meeting for?

It’s a conversation between you and the people who report to your managers, without their manager in the room. Its job is to hear what doesn’t travel up the line, not to check up on your managers.

Information thins out as it climbs. That isn’t because your managers hide things. It’s because every layer filters for what seems important, and small things get dropped: a priority nobody understands, a tool that wastes an hour a day, a quiet person who is thinking of leaving. Silence is part of it too. In Harvard Business Review, James Detert and Amy Edmondson describe self-censorship at work as “common, from the rank and file right up through senior management.” If people hold back with their own manager, they hold back even more with yours.

A skip-level meeting gives you three things you can’t get from a report:

• Unfiltered news. What people find hard, in their own words.
• A read on how your strategy lands. Whether the people doing the work can say what matters this quarter and why.
• A relationship. People two layers down get to know you as a person, which makes them more likely to speak up when it counts.

What it is not: a performance review of their manager, a place to make decisions on the spot, or a chance to show you know more about their work than they do.

How do you set one up without undermining your managers?

Tell your managers first, explain what it’s for, and agree how you’ll use what you hear. Most of the damage skip-levels do comes from managers finding out afterwards.

Have a short conversation with each manager before you book anything:

“I’d like to start meeting your team in small groups every quarter. It’s not about checking on you. I want to hear how the work feels from where they sit, and I’ll bring the themes back to you first. I won’t act on anything without talking to you. Is there anything you’d want me to know before I start?”

Then agree three ground rules together:

1. Themes, not names. You’ll share patterns, not who said what.
2. No end-runs. If someone raises a problem their manager should solve, you’ll point them back to their manager, and help the manager solve it.
3. Managers hear it first. Before you tell the wider group what you’re changing, the manager knows.

It also helps to tell the people two layers down what the meeting is for, in writing, before it happens. They are often nervous too. Melody Wilding’s HBR guidance for employees meeting their boss’s boss says that building those relationships “requires strategy, humility, and diligence.” If the person across the table is preparing that hard, the least you can do is make the purpose clear.

If you’re still finding your feet in this role, the Managers of managers hub covers the wider shift from leading people to leading leaders.

How often should you hold skip-level meetings?

Often enough that people remember the last one. For most leaders that means each person two layers down gets some time with you about once a quarter, usually in a small group.

The right rhythm depends on how many people sit two layers down. A rough way to work it out:

• Up to about 20 people: you can probably see everyone individually once or twice a year and in small groups the rest of the time.
• 20 to 60 people: small groups of four to six, once a quarter, works for most leaders. That is roughly two or three meetings a month.
• More than 60: groups, a mix of teams in each, and an open slot people can book if they want time alone.

If your managers each have a very large or very small team, it affects this too. The Span Check calculator helps you see how your structure is shaped.

Whatever you choose, keep it. A skip-level that happens once, with great energy, and then never again teaches people that the exercise was for show. A short meeting that turns up every quarter, on time, teaches them it is real.

What should a skip-level meeting agenda look like?

Light. Thirty to forty-five minutes, a few open questions, and most of the time spent listening. If you’re talking for more than about a third of it, you’re running a briefing, not a skip-level.

A simple shape that works for a group:

1. Open (5 minutes). Say why you’re there, that themes go back to managers without names, and what you did with what you heard last time.
2. Their work (15 to 20 minutes). Open questions about what’s going well and what’s getting stuck.
3. The bigger picture (10 minutes). What people understand about where the team or company is heading, and what they’d like to know.
4. Close (5 minutes). Read back the two or three things you heard most clearly, and say when they’ll hear back from you.

For a one-on-one, add time for the person’s own growth: what they’d like to be doing in a year, and who knows that.

For more on what to ask, see the Skip-Level Pulse test page. The habits of a good one-on-one carry over too, so it’s worth reading why one-on-ones feel like a waste of time if your own meetings tend to drift into status updates.

What do you do with what you hear?

Share the themes with your managers first, decide what you’ll change, and tell people within a couple of weeks. Being heard and then seeing nothing happen is worse than not being asked.

A short routine after each meeting:

• Same day: write down the themes while they’re fresh. Note anything that needs urgent action, such as a safety issue or a serious complaint, and follow your company’s process for it.
• Within a week: talk to the manager. “Three people mentioned the handover from sales is causing rework. Have you seen that? What would help?”
• Within two weeks: tell the group what’s happening. Even “we looked at it and can’t change it this quarter, here’s why” counts as closing the loop.

Don’t forget the good news. People two layers down rarely hear directly from senior leaders about work they’re proud of. Gallup’s research on recognition found that “the most memorable recognition comes most often from an employee’s manager” at 28%, followed by a high-level leader or CEO at 24% and the manager’s manager at 12%. Your manager can’t give the recognition that comes from you. A specific thank-you in a skip-level, followed by a word to their manager about it, costs nothing.

What does a skip-level meeting look like in practice?

Here is a hypothetical example. A head of operations leads three managers, who between them lead 26 people. She has never held a skip-level. Her managers are capable, the numbers are fine, and she assumes she would hear about anything serious.

She starts by telling each manager what she plans to do and agreeing the three ground rules. Then she books four small groups of six or seven, mixing people from different teams so no one feels singled out. Each session is 40 minutes, and she sends the purpose a week ahead.

In the first group, she asks:

• “What’s one thing that made your work easier this month, and one thing that made it harder?”
• “If you could stop one meeting or process tomorrow, which would it be?”
• “What do you think matters most to the team this quarter? How did you hear about it?”
• “What do you wish someone senior understood about your job?”
• “Who on your team did something recently that deserves more credit than it got?”

The first ten minutes are polite. Then someone mentions, almost in passing, that a weekly report takes most of a Friday morning and nobody seems to read it. Two others nod. Later, when she asks about priorities, the group can name last quarter’s goal but not this one. And the credit question surfaces a junior analyst who quietly rebuilt a broken process, which none of the managers had mentioned to her.

What she does next is the important part:

1. She checks with the manager who owns the report. It turns out it was set up for a director who left a year ago. They cut it to a monthly summary.
2. She rewrites how the quarter’s priorities are shared. Each manager now opens their team meeting with the same three lines, in the same words.
3. She thanks the analyst directly, by name, in a short note copied to the analyst’s manager.
4. She goes back to the group two weeks later with a two-line update on each.

By the second round of meetings, people come with topics. That is the sign it’s working. Notice that nothing here was dramatic, and none of it reflected badly on the managers. It was simply information that had never made it up two layers.

How do you know if your skip-levels are working?

Look at four things: how much contact you really have, whether unfiltered news reaches you, whether people two layers down hear recognition from you, and whether their careers ever come up. Most leaders are strong on one or two and weaker on the rest.

• Contact. Count how many people two layers down you’ve had a real conversation with in the last three months. Not a town hall, a conversation.
• Unfiltered news. Think of the last time you heard about a problem from someone two layers down before their manager told you. If you can’t remember, things are probably being filtered, however well meant.
• Recognition. Can you name something specific that three people two layers down did well recently? Did you tell them?
• Career conversations. Do you know what any of them want to be doing in two years? This is also how you spot your future managers early. Bench Strength looks at that side of things.

One more check, and it’s an uncomfortable one. Think back to the last time something a junior person said changed your mind. If people raise ideas and nothing ever moves, they stop raising them, and your skip-levels will slowly go quiet. For ways to get an honest read from your own direct team, see how to find out what your team really thinks of you.

How well do you know what’s happening two layers down?

You probably have a sense of which of those four areas is weakest. A short, structured check turns that sense into a place to start.

The free Skip-Level Pulse asks 12 questions about how well you know what’s happening two layers below you. It takes about 4 minutes, there’s no sign-up and your answers stay in your browser. You get a score out of 100 across the four areas in this post: contact, unfiltered news, recognition and career conversations. The two where your view is thinnest come back first, each with one thing to try. It’s designed for the people two layers down to answer anonymously. Team mode is coming, so for now you rate yourself, which shows how you see it, not how they do. Treat the score as a starting point for a conversation, not a diagnosis.

For a wider read on your leadership habits, including how often you change your mind when someone junior gives you a reason, try the free 42 Test.

A skip-level meeting isn’t hard to run. The hard part is what comes after it. Tell your managers first, keep the rhythm, listen more than you talk, and make sure people can see that speaking up changed something.