Why and how to do skip level 1-1s
The further up you go in an organization, the less you know what’s going on. A lot of your effectiveness depends on learning to sense your organization.
Skip levels allow you to create relationships with people throughout your organization. And perhaps more importantly, they give you information about what is happening within your organization. You can learn important signals such as:
I’ve generally worked within small to medium sized organizations. In theory you can use skip levels at any sized organization. One thing you’ll probably need to decide in a larger organization is whether you want to meet with 2 levels down, or all the way down. I suspect it’s usually valuable to go all the way down, because that keeps you grounded to the work being built. But the tradeoff is that you get less opportunity to build relationships with managers in your organization.
Since I generally keep the number of meetings limited to what I’m comfortable with every week (usually one or two), this means as your organization size changes, the frequency you meet with people changes. It could take a year to get through the whole organization!
