Skip level meetings

For part 2 of the Dafacto meeting series I present: Skip level meetings.

I love having regular skip level meetings. For those who have never heard of a skip level, the term refers to the direct reports of your direct reports. I try to hold a 1-1 meeting with each of my skips every 4-6 weeks. In my last organization, I had regular skip level meetings with about 9 people (all of my US folks. I did not hold regular skips with my overseas staff, though I met with almost all of them when I went to visit). Including the weekly 1-1’s with my direct reports, I typically had 7 hours of meetings with various staff members. Obviously, this was an enormous investment in time. Was it worthwhile? Absolutely. Otherwise you are dependent on your directs for information regarding things like staff morale, organizational issues, project progress, etc. I know staff found them valuable.

What did we talk about? Though the skip owned the meeting agenda (notice a theme), the skips were really focused on two things. First, staff development. I wanted to learn the staffs’ career and personal goals. We would use the time to talk about if they were making progress against those goals and what could I do to help.The time was very focused on their careers. In fact, after my first meeting, each person had to put together a development plan so we would have a structured conversation about their development.

Second, we talked about their projects. We talked about what was going well and what was not. People knew that I was fair and that if a project wasn’t going well, they would often tell me in those meetings. There were a couple of times where one of my directs was not living up to his commitment to his staff and the folks on his team needed a channel to be able to voice their concerns. Also, I would get to learn what was going well and use that information to give folks special recognition (I gave bottles of wine and gift cards) and visibility both in the team and to more senior executives.

One last thing. As a manager, it is very easy to move or cancel these meetings. After all, these folks are on your staff and are going to understand that stuff comes up. Right? As a leader, it is a terrible idea. If I had no choice, I would sometime postpone, knowing that this was sending a bad message to the staff member. I tried would make sure that they knew I did not want to cancel the meeting, and reschedule as soon as practical. The worst thing is blowing off the meetings. You wind up alienating the staff instead of helping them.