Skip-Level Meeting

A meeting that bypasses your manager was designed to make hierarchy feel less hierarchical.

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A skip-level meeting is a one-on-one conversation between an employee and their manager’s manager, skipping one level in the organizational hierarchy. The practice became formalized in large technology and consulting firms during the 1990s as organizations grew concerned that middle managers were filtering information and that senior leaders were losing touch with frontline conditions.¹

The logic was borrowed from military command structures, where senior officers periodically inspect lower ranks directly. Intel, under CEO Andy Grove, was among the earliest technology companies to advocate for the practice, viewing it as a mechanism for maintaining what Grove called high output management.² The meeting gave senior leaders an unfiltered view of team morale and operations while giving employees a rare audience with power.

The skip-level meeting assumes a problem that only exists within a hierarchy, the possibility that managers obstruct or distort the flow of information. It solves a hierarchical problem with a hierarchical solution, adding another meeting to a calendar already full of them, rather than questioning whether the layers of management that create the information gap are necessary.³

By the 2010s, the practice had become standard in companies including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, typically conducted quarterly. The meetings are voluntary in theory and obligatory in practice, creating a ritual that simultaneously acknowledges the limitations of hierarchy and reinforces it.⁴

Timeline

1983, Andy Grove publishes High Output Management, advocating direct communication across organizational levels.
1990s, Skip-level meetings become formalized in technology and consulting firms.
2010s, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft adopt the practice as a standard quarterly ritual.

Endnotes

Andy Grove, High Output Management (New York: Random House, 1983).
Grove, High Output Management, 71–85.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018).
Laszlo Bock, Work Rules! (New York: Twelve, 2015).