Skip-level meeting
A skip-level meeting is a conversation between a manager’s manager and an employee, without the direct manager present, used to gather unfiltered ground-truth signal.
A skip-level meeting is a one-on-one between a senior leader and an employee one or more levels below their direct reports — "skipping" the middle manager. For the leader, it is unfiltered signal: how work actually happens, what the team believes but does not say upward, and how well the middle manager’s story matches the ground truth. For the employee, it is visibility, strategic context, and a relationship with leadership they would otherwise never build. Common cadence is quarterly or twice a year per employee, rotating across the organization.
Skip-levels go wrong when they feel like surveillance — either the middle manager experiences them as a gotcha, or the employee suspects their answers will be relayed verbatim. The standard protocol: announce them as routine practice, never use them to evaluate the employee, and share themes upward and downward rather than attributed quotes.
How this connects to Mistvine
Mistvine gives skip-level managers read-only visibility along the reporting chain — they can see what a direct manager sees without a meeting, so the skip-level conversation starts informed rather than cold.