Skip-Level Meetings
What They're For, and What They're Actually Testing

The key insight:

A skip-level is not a performance review and it is not small talk. It is forty minutes in which someone two levels up forms a read on you that will outlast the meeting.

Most guidance on skip-level meetings is written for one side of the table only, the senior leader deciding whether to hold them. That leaves out the more common version: you are a director or a manager, and your boss's boss has just asked for thirty minutes, alone. Both directions belong in the same guide, because they are the same meeting, and the psychometric question they both raise is identical.

What is a skip-level meeting?

A skip-level meeting is a conversation between a leader and someone two or more levels below them in the reporting line, deliberately without the manager in between. A VP talking directly to a manager's individual contributors is a skip-level. A director being invited to a one-to-one by their own boss's boss, jumping past their direct manager, is the same format from the other side. The defining feature is not seniority, it is the deliberate skip: information and impressions travel without passing through the layer that would normally filter them.

SHRM's guidance for senior managers on skip-level meetings frames the case for holding them plainly: they exist to bypass middle management and get an authentic read on culture and performance that would otherwise be filtered, and they matter most where a function has chronic performance issues, high turnover or disengagement that is not showing up clearly through the normal chain. That is the convening leader's side of the argument. The being-invited side is less written about and, for a director or VP on the way up, more consequential.

Running skip-levels with your reports' reports

If you are the one convening them, the operating discipline is simple to state and easy to get wrong in practice. Announce the cadence rather than springing individual meetings. A skip-level programme that covers the whole team on a rotation, on a schedule the direct managers know about, reads as governance. The same conversations, held ad hoc and only with people a manager has recently had friction with, read as something else entirely, whatever the actual intent.

Ask questions a direct manager could not, or would not, get honest answers to. Not "how are things going," which invites a polite non-answer, but something closer to: what is genuinely slowing the team down that has not made it up the chain yet, where does strategy feel unclear once it lands at this level, and what would you change here if you had the authority to. SHRM's guidance is specific about what to do with what you hear: be precise rather than vague when the feedback needs to travel back to a manager, and pair any critical observation with clear, measurable expectations, because a skip-level that surfaces a real problem and then does nothing concrete about it teaches the whole team that the format is theatre.

CCL's research on leadership communication makes the underlying case for why this matters more than it looks: better conversations are what actually drive a stronger culture, and mismanaged or absent communication compounds into costs that are sometimes tangible, like turnover, and sometimes not, like eroded trust and worse decisions. A skip-level programme, run honestly, is one of the few structural mechanisms that catches a communication failure before it becomes a turnover number.

Being invited to one by your boss's boss

This is the version most senior professionals actually search for, and it is where the psychometric question lives. A skip-level with your boss's boss is not a performance review, and it is rarely small talk either. It is forty minutes in which someone two levels above you forms a read on you directly, without your own manager's framing in the room, and that read tends to be unusually durable precisely because it was formed without an intermediary.

Which of the five dimensions the Leadership Psychometric measures shows up most under that specific pressure is close to the whole game. Someone whose Execution Drive is high will tend to arrive with concrete, well-evidenced points and get to them quickly, which reads as prepared and credible in a compressed slot. Someone whose Influencing Power is high but whose Execution Drive is lower may talk fluently and warmly for the full thirty minutes and leave the senior leader without a single specific, memorable fact to anchor the impression to, which is a worse outcome than it feels like in the room. Composure matters more than either: a skip-level is, by design, a slightly unusual and unscripted format, and how you handle an unexpected or pointed question inside it is itself part of what is being read, whether or not anyone says so out loud.

The practical version of that: come with one or two specific, well-evidenced points rather than a list. A genuine improvement you have seen that has not travelled up the chain yet, a real obstacle with a concrete example attached, or a considered question about direction, each land considerably better than a general status update your manager could already have given. Do not use the meeting to relitigate a disagreement with your direct manager. That reads, correctly, as trying to route around the normal chain rather than fix the relationship in it, which is the opposite of the credibility you want a skip-level to build.

The three ways skip-levels go wrong

Surveillance. A skip-level programme that exists to check whether a manager's account of their team matches what the team says, rather than to genuinely hear from people two levels down, corrodes trust fast once it is noticed, and it is usually noticed. The tell is whether the same questions get asked of everyone on a schedule, or only of people connected to a specific manager the senior leader is quietly assessing.

Bypassing the manager. A skip-level used to make decisions, reassign work or resolve disputes that should run through the direct manager undermines that manager's authority whether or not that is the intention. The fix is procedural rather than a matter of good intentions: decisions stay with the manager, the skip-level stays a listening and relationship-building exercise, and anything that needs to change gets fed back through the manager rather than around them.

Theatre. A skip-level that surfaces a real, specific problem and produces no visible change teaches everyone in the rotation, quickly, that the format is a box-ticking exercise. This is the failure mode SHRM's guidance is most explicit about avoiding: pair anything genuinely raised with a clear, measurable follow-up, or do not raise the expectation that speaking up will change anything.

None of this overlaps with the separate question of how you manage the relationship with your own boss day to day, which runs through a different asymmetry entirely and is covered in our guide to how to manage up. A skip-level is specifically about the meeting that jumps a level, in either direction, not the ongoing management of the relationship immediately above you.

If you want a structured read on how your Execution Drive and Composure actually show up under exactly this kind of unscripted, compressed pressure, rather than guessing from how your last skip-level went, take the free Leadership Psychometric on AssessYou. It takes ten to fifteen minutes and scores all five dimensions from your own answers. If you would rather see what the report covers first, the Leadership Psychometric overview sets out how it is built before you create an account.

The same mechanism exists at board level, in a more formal register. JOH Partners' own analysis of the chief audit executive seat covers the executive session, the structural equivalent of a skip-level, where a board deliberately hears from a function head directly, without the layer in between, before deciding how much to trust what normally reaches it through that layer. The mechanism is the same one this guide describes at individual level: an unfiltered read is only useful if what happens afterwards proves the format was not theatre.

Key takeaways

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