Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

What Is A Skip Level Meeting?

15 Jan 2018 · 1 min

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0:51

Short video by Cameron Herold explaining what a skip level meeting is: a senior leader (example: COO) meets with a team while intentionally skipping their direct manager (e.g., VP of Marketing) to gather insights and hear ideas. Herold emphasizes the meeting’s purpose is to listen and gather information without engaging in decision-making or detailed debate with employees.

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A skip level meeting is when a COO skips over one of their direct reports, like a VP of marketing, to meet with their marketing team. So the skip level meeting, the reason for it is to gain insights from that team without the leader present or to actually be able to talk to the team without the leader present. It's really critical though, when you do a skip level meeting to not completely engage with the employees. So as an example, the COO would skip over the VP of marketing and meet with all the people in the marketing team and would just ask ideas or ask questions of them, say what do you think about this? And then the team would give answers and he would say that's interesting. Or she would say that's interesting or thank you. So it's a lot of engaging but not getting into a direct discussion with the team. Some great insights can be shared, some great insights can be learned, but the key is for the COO not to actually directly engage into a direct discussion or have any decisions come out of that meeting. So it's to gain insights and to share ideas.