Skip-level meeting: purpose, questions, cadence, and the notes that stay with the manager (2026)

A skip-level meeting is a conversation between a manager and an employee two levels down — someone who reports to one of the manager's direct reports. The level in between is skipped, which is where the name comes from, and which is also the whole point: the senior manager hears about the work, the team and the direct manager from someone who sees all three every day, without the summary that normally arrives through the chain.

This guide is the craft first — what the meeting is for and what it is not, how both people prepare, a template you can copy, fifteen questions grouped by what you want to learn, the cadence per report and the four ways a skip-level goes wrong — then the mechanics: where its notes live in the tools your organization already uses, and what happens to them between one skip-level and the next, nine months later. Because the test of a skip-level is not the hour. It is whether the manager can open what the same person said last time before opening the call.

What a skip-level meeting is — and what it isn't

Three recurring conversations sit around a report, and they are confused with each other more often than any other meetings on the calendar:

A skip-level is not a one-on-one one level up, and it is not an appraisal of the direct manager conducted through their report. The one-on-one belongs to the report and runs on a weekly cadence; the skip-level belongs to the senior manager, happens a few times a year, and is announced to the direct manager before it is booked. A skip-level that the direct manager learns about afterwards has already done damage that no question in it can repair.

What a skip-level meeting is for

Three things, in this order:

1. An unfiltered read of the work. How a project really stands, what the team actually spends its days on, which process everyone works around. Each layer of management summarizes, and each summary is honest and incomplete; two layers of summary leave the senior manager with a picture that is tidy and a quarter old.
2. A check on the layer between. Not "is your manager good" — that question produces nothing a report can safely answer — but whether priorities arrive clearly, whether decisions get made at the speed the work needs, whether feedback flows in both directions. The direct manager's job is observable from below in a way it never is from above.
3. A relationship before it is needed. Promotions, reorganizations, a resignation that could have been prevented — each of those goes better when the senior manager and the person are not meeting for the first time. The skip-level is where that relationship is built on ordinary days.

What it is not for: assigning work, which bypasses the direct manager and teaches the team that the chain is optional; delivering the manager's feedback to the report second-hand; and collecting complaints to act on in the room. Anything that needs a decision goes back through the direct manager, with the report knowing that it will.

How to prepare and run it

Tell the direct manager first, and tell them why. One message, before any invitation goes out: who you are meeting, when, and that the purpose is to hear about the work and the team, not to review them. Ask whether there is anything you should know — a project under pressure, a conversation already under way. A direct manager who hears this from you in advance treats the skip-level as part of how the organization runs; one who hears it from their report treats it as a verdict.

Send the report the questions a week before. A skip-level is the one meeting where the junior person has the most to lose from a surprise. Post the three or four questions you intend to ask where you and the report can both see them, and say explicitly what happens to the answers: what you will write down, who can read it, and what will reach their manager in what form. "I will tell Dana the themes, not the sentences" is a sentence worth saying before the first question, every time.

In the meeting, their items first, then your questions, then what happens next. Open with whatever the report brought — a question about the company, something they want to understand — and only then work through your own list. Ask the second question more than the first: "what makes you say that?" is where the unfiltered read actually lives. Close with the loop-back, said aloud: "here is what I am taking away, here is what I will tell your manager, here is what I will come back to you about, and when." That sentence is the record of the meeting, and saying it in the room is what makes it accurate.

After the meeting, write it down the same day, and close the loop within a week. What you heard, in themes; what you promised; what goes to the direct manager and in what words. Then do the two things you said you would do, and tell the report that you did. A skip-level without a loop-back is a survey, and the second one gets survey answers.

How to run the hour itself — the opening, the time boxes, the read-back at the end — is the same craft as any meeting, and it is in how to run an effective meeting.

A skip-level meeting template

[Report] / [Senior manager] — skip-level
Cadence: [twice a year, or quarterly] · Length: 30 min · Link: [the same meeting link every time]
Their manager: [name] — told on [date]
Pre-read for the report: the questions below, sent [a week before]; the notes of the last skip-level
What happens to the notes: [one sentence — who reads them, what reaches the direct manager and how]

1. Your items — report — 10 min
[Anything they want to ask or understand about the company, the direction, their own path.]

2. The work — senior manager asks — 8 min
[What is the team spending its time on that the plan does not show? What is slower than it should be?]

3. The team and how it is run — senior manager asks — 7 min
[How do priorities reach you? When did you last get a decision you were waiting for? What would you change?]

4. The loop-back, said aloud — senior manager — 5 min
Themes I am taking away · what goes to [manager], in what form · what I will come back to you about, by [date].

For a report you are meeting for the first time, swap item 3 for ten minutes on their path: how they came to the team, what they want to be doing in a year, what they would need to get there. The question about the manager comes on the second visit, when the answer can be honest.

Fifteen questions, by what you want to learn

The work as it really is

• What is the team spending time on that nobody above you sees?
• What took longer last month than it should have, and why?
• Which process does everyone work around, and what does the workaround cost?

How the team is run

• How do priorities reach you — and how often do they change before the work is done?
• When did you last wait for a decision, and how long did it take?
• What does your manager do that you would want every manager here to do?

The direction

• What is one thing about the company's direction you would like explained better?
• Which decision from the last quarter made the least sense from where you sit?
• If you ran this team for a month, what would you change first?

Their path

• What would you like to be doing a year from now that you are not doing today?
• What is one skill you would like to be known for here?
• Who in the organization has helped you most, and how?

What you should hear and have not

• What is a question you expected me to ask?
• What do people say in the team chat that they would not say in a meeting?
• Is there anything I should know that you have not been able to say to anyone?

Three or four per meeting is plenty; the point is the follow-up question, not the list. The same discipline — ask, then ask what makes them say that — applies to the questions a manager asks in a one-on-one, and sixty of those are in one-on-one meeting questions.

Cadence: how often, with how many people, and the rule about the middle

The numbers follow from arithmetic: a quarterly 30-minute skip-level with 40 people is 20 hours a quarter, which is why past forty the cadence drops or the group meeting replaces part of it. Whatever the interval, three rules hold. The direct manager is told before every one, not just the first. Each report is met on the same rhythm — a skip-level that happens only with the people the senior manager already likes is read exactly that way by everyone else. And the same meeting link is kept every time, so the history of the conversation with each person has one address. How the skip-level fits next to the stand-up, the weekly and the one-on-one in a team's rhythm, with a template sized for 5 to 50 people, is in meeting cadence.

Four ways a skip-level goes wrong

It becomes a review of the direct manager. The report cannot answer "how is your manager doing" without weighing what the answer costs them, so the honest version of the question is about mechanics: how priorities arrive, how long decisions take, how feedback flows. The senior manager forms the view; the report is not asked to deliver it.

The senior manager fixes things in the room. A problem solved on the spot bypasses the direct manager and tells the team where decisions really get made. The right answer is "I'll raise that with Dana this week and come back to you" — and then doing both halves.

The words travel verbatim. A sentence from a skip-level, repeated to the direct manager with the report's name on it, ends the usefulness of every future skip-level in that team. Themes travel; sentences do not. Say this before the first question, and keep to it afterwards.

There is no loop-back. The report answered honestly, the senior manager nodded, nothing visibly changed and nothing was said about why. The second skip-level with that person is a formality. One message within a week — what you did, what you decided not to do and why — is what keeps the second one as honest as the first.

Where the notes live in the tools you already use

A skip-level is a meeting with a long memory and a small audience: what a person said in March matters in December, and the people who should read it are fewer than for any other meeting. Where the notes go is therefore a design decision. Documented behaviour only, from the vendors' own pages, checked October 2026:

Two things are the same everywhere. The record is a document beside the meeting, written by hand or by the vendor's notetaker in the meeting's one language, and what it holds afterwards depends on where the document was saved — where Teams and Meet keep the transcript and summary after the call, and for how long, is its own guide. A third-party notetaker changes the audience question rather than answering it: a bot in a skip-level is a third participant whose storage, retention and sharing the senior manager has to be able to explain to the report in one sentence before choosing one — the Otter.ai alternatives guide lists nine of them with their plans, limits and languages, and the question to put to each is the same.

The notes that stay with the manager

InterMIND is a communication space where a meeting lives in a channel, so a skip-level is a channel the senior manager hosts, with two members and one permanent meeting link. The questions go into the channel a week before as a note; the report adds their items below; during the call either of you puts the note on both screens with Share to conference and edits it live, and the other reads it in their own language — as they read the channel's chat, where each member types in their own language and reads the other's in theirs. If the questions are drafted elsewhere, they land in the channel by email: every channel has its own address, and a message sent to it appears as a regular message with the sender named.

When the session ends, the recap is written from the meeting itself: a summary, the points marked agreed, open or disputed, the action items with owners — the loop-back you said aloud, with its timestamp. It arrives by email, as a message in the channel and as a link in the calendar event, and each member reads it in their own language — translated per reader, not written once in whichever language the two of you compromised on. Either member can edit it, every edit keeps author and revision history, and the channel keeps the recap of every past session, so what this person said in March is one click away in December, before the call rather than from memory. The recap is members-only: opening it needs a sign-in, access is limited to the host, the people who took part and the members of the host's team, and forwarding the link to anyone else grants nothing. The host can add a recap copy to any address — a CRM or a tracker inbound mailbox — so the loop-back reaches the system of record without anyone forwarding anything.

In an organization with team status pages on, the open items of earlier sessions are judged when the next recap is written — an item someone reported finished is marked done, an item discussed but not finished is marked not done with the reason in the words of the meeting, an item nobody brought up stays open — with the verdicts on the organization's status page rather than in the recap, and at the start of the next session Mia names the open items and their owners, so the promise from last quarter is spoken about rather than lost. Team status pages are a preview feature: an organization's admin switches them on under Settings → Advanced after accepting the alpha terms (the Preview features page describes each one).

When the skip-level is with someone outside the organization — a contractor two levels down, a person at a partner — the other person joins by link, without an account and at no cost, from a phone or a browser, and hears the meeting live in their own language. There is no record for a guest afterwards — the account is free, and it is what makes the record reachable. The host provides the space and, on a paid plan, pays only for the members active in the previous 28 days; a member who goes quiet between two skip-levels keeps their access at no cost.

• Open a complete recap — a real record rendered by the same code that writes yours.
• Try the live demo — no signup; speak, and hear the room translated per listener.

The craft of the skip-level survives every tool: someone still has to tell the direct manager first, send the questions a week ahead and close the loop within one. What does not have to survive is the second job — typing the notes by hand after the call, in one language, into a document that nobody will find nine months later.

FAQ

What is a skip-level meeting?

A skip-level meeting is a conversation between a manager and an employee who reports to one of that manager's direct reports — two levels down, with the level in between skipped. The direct manager is told in advance and is not in the room. It is held a few times a year per report, the report's items come first, and the senior manager's questions are about the work and how the team is run, not about the person or their manager as a verdict.

What is the purpose of a skip-level meeting?

Three things: an unfiltered read of how the work really goes, a check on whether the layer in between is working — priorities arriving clearly, decisions made at the speed the work needs — and a relationship between the senior manager and the person before a promotion, a reorganization or a resignation makes one necessary. It is not for assigning work, delivering second-hand feedback or solving problems in the room.

How do I prepare for a skip-level meeting with my manager's manager?

Read the questions they sent, and bring two or three items of your own: something about the company's direction you want explained, a decision you would like to understand, where you want to be in a year. Answer about mechanics rather than people — how priorities reach you, how long decisions take — and ask what will be written down and who will read it; a good senior manager tells you before you ask. The template above works from either side.

What questions should you ask in a skip-level meeting?

As the senior manager: what the team spends time on that the plan does not show, what took longer than it should have, how priorities arrive, when the report last waited for a decision, what they would change first if they ran the team for a month, and what they expected you to ask. As the report: what the senior manager sees as the team's biggest risk, which decision they would like the team to understand better, and what a good year in your role looks like from their seat. Three or four per meeting, with the follow-up question each time.

How often should skip-level meetings happen?

Quarterly per report when the senior manager has up to about fifteen people two levels down; twice a year in rotation up to forty; quarterly with each report of a new direct manager during their first six months; once in the first month for a team through a reorganization. Every report on the same rhythm, the direct manager told before each one, the same meeting link kept every time.

Are skip-level meetings confidential?

The honest answer is "themes travel, sentences do not", and the senior manager should say it before the first question. What the report says is not repeated verbatim or attributed; what the senior manager learns about how the team is run does reach the direct manager, in themes, because acting on it is the point. Where the written record goes — who can open the notes, which tool holds them, and for how long — is part of that promise, and the table above says what each tool documents.

What should you not say in a skip-level meeting?

As the report: nothing you would not want to reach your manager as a theme, and nothing about a colleague that belongs in a conversation with them. As the senior manager: no assignments, no decisions made in the room, no feedback on behalf of the direct manager, and no sentence that starts "your manager told me". The skip-level holds its value only while both people can trust where its words go.

Sources: Microsoft — Take meeting notes in Microsoft Teams; Microsoft — Use collaborative notes in Microsoft Teams chats; Google — Calendar & Meet settings for "Take notes for me"; Slack — One-on-one meeting template. checked October 2026.