Fractional VP Engineering, Leadership & Executive Coach, Mentor, Organizational Developer, Advisor, Speaker, Moderator | Former SaaS founder, CEO
A word of caution for leaders: Don’t rely on skip-level meetings to assess manager performance. A widely-shared notion in management literature is that skip-level meetings are supposed to be a good place for higher-level leaders to check on manager performance. In my experience, that's basically never true. Most people don't like to talk badly or even critically about their direct manager, let alone in front of that person's boss. Challenges like low trust, impact of perceptions, and power dynamics can make this even trickier. It's still worth doing your best to make skip-level meetings a space where the skip-level report can bring up any concerns they have about their manager’s performance. Just don’t rely exclusively on skip-level meetings to get such feedback. It’s more effective to check on a manager/direct reports’ performance through onboarding surveys, regular and well-utilized employee engagement surveys, 360 feedback, and other direct reviews, as well as various open feedback channels.
