Advice for Successful Skip-Level Meetings

If you’ve considered conducting skip-level meetings in your organization, you’re on the right track. Skip-level meetings can encourage trust between an organization’s leaders and employees, lead to more effective training for mid-level managers and uncover challenges within the organization that you may not have known existed. To take advantage of these benefits you need to go beyond just scheduling them. Bypassing your mid-level managers to speak directly to their employees can raise some eyebrows and be ineffective if you’re not careful.

What is a Skip Level Meeting?

As you might infer from the title a Skip Level Meeting is a meeting where managers or executives meet with employees two or more levels down from them in the org chart. The purpose of these meetings are to address team/company/department concerns & obstacles as well as to solicit ideas for productivity which may be stifled during the daily grind. Skip Level meetings can be most effective when integrated into a review or planning process on a regular or annual basis.

How to Have More Effective Skip-Level Meetings

     1. Make More Appearances Prior to Scheduling.

You want employees to feel comfortable opening up to you. This requires more than just randomly stopping by their cubicles to ask a few questions. Relationships are built on trust, and you must give employees time to develop that. Make more unannounced appearances during the workweek. Give them the opportunity to warm up to you before you whip out your top ten questions for skip-level interviews.

Meeting taken from a high point of view

     2. Schedule the Meetings Consistently.

You decide how frequently you want to schedule the skip-level-meetings but whatever you decide, stick to it. This can be once every 3 weeks, once a month or even once a quarter. Being consistent means employees won’t have to guess when they will see you again and it works wonders at building trust.

     3. Be Open to Questions.

You may the one asking the questions but you can also answer them. When trust is established and employees begin opening up to you about their experiences, concerns and other issues, there’s a good chance they will have some questions. Welcome these inquiries. Ensure they know you are all on the same team. If you are asked you a question for which you don’t have an answer, let them know you will research and follow up with them. This helps improve communication and works to serve everyone.

     4. Take Time to Evaluate the Information You Receive About Your Managers.

It’s easy to call out a manager for reports of poor leadership but you should think twice before reacting. Consider the information you receive as a whole. Do you notice any patterns? Are any employees’ reports vastly different from the rest? Can you trust the validity of any complaints you have received? Manager-employee relationships can be strained for numerous reasons and can cause bias to surface. Before you implement a plan of action, be sure you are confident in the items you choose to address. Skip-level meetings are great tools but offer you everyone’s side but the managers’.

     5. Prepare Your Managers in Advance.

Skip-level meetings can be intimidating to managers as they shine a spotlight on their managerial skills. Inform them as early as possible that you will begin conducting them. Encourage them to address all questions and concerns as they arise. Receiving your managers’ buy-in is an essential component to the success of these meetings as they will ultimately be responsible for implementing the changes you recommend.

Experiment with Skip-Level Meetings

Building good rapport with your managers and their employees will help keep your organization running smoothly. Take as much time as you need to implement an effective skip-level meeting process. Try asking different sets of questions, experiment with different meeting times, and getting to know employees personally. There may be some trial and error but you will eventually develop a system that works for your team.