Why You Should Have Regular Meetings with Your Skip Level Manager
Hey there, this is Laura.
This week I want to touch on something that might not be standard practice and that is having 1 to 1s with your skip level manager.
Before we get into how to make these useful let’s set some ground rules and dispel some myths that I have heard.
It’s totally okay to have a meeting with your skip level manager. They’re not God himself, never to be spoken to. If your manager is in any way against this, this is a red flag. Don’t take it lightly!
Your meeting with your skip level won’t be as often as with your direct line manager. Since organizations tend to explode in numbers from one managerial level to another, your skip probably doesn’t have enough hours in a day to have a weekly 1 to 1 with everyone, let alone also do some other work. Expect a lower frequency, for example every second week or once per month.
This meeting, if done right, is mutually beneficial so don’t feel guilty for “taking their time”.
It’s also okay for you to initiate this if your skip level doesn’t do it. Approach them and ask them if you can have 30 minutes every so often and I think you’ll find that people are very open to it.
Now that we got that out of the way, let’s look at how we can make the most out of these meetings and also how to make sure that our skip level manager makes the most out of them.
First and foremost,
Forget the day to day.
This meeting is not about giving them a rundown of what you did the past 2 weeks and what you’re planning on doing next. I’m also sure they have better mechanisms of getting regular updates than that time with you. Instead, use this time on big picture stuff. Ask them about the company priorities and why they are what they are. Ask them about why some actions don’t seem to align with the company priority. Ask how YOU and YOUR WORK fit into the company and where do they see this area evolving in the next 3-5 years. Ask them what interesting projects are coming and whether or not you’ll be involved in them. This is really an opportunity for you to form a bigger picture than what the day to day entails.
Another thing you should ask them is what they think is working well and not working so well in your team, in your department. This will give you an interesting perspective of how your team’s work is viewed by leadership and puts you in the unique position to dispel some myths, to clarify some wrong assumptions. Along the same lines, if you see that not a lot of details are known by leadership, you should consider what can you do to improve the visibility of your team and your own work. I can tell you right now, if people don’t know what you do, this is going to be bad for your career, even if the work is of a very high quality standard. You need to also market your work to leadership and this is an opportunity to do so.
Give them feedback.
This might be daunting to do but one of the reasons this meeting is also beneficial for your skip level is that they can get information from you about things that they might not see. This is especially true in the case of low morale for example. I can assure you, if you have a reasonably good skip level, they want to know if the organization morale is low and what is causing that. Of course, there is a chance that they won’t take the feedback, you do run the risk of this. But then again, they can’t fix what they’re not aware of. Give them the opportunity to fix wrong perceptions, to fix wrong processes, to help the team out with their endorsement or vote, to make sure that decisions are known and communicated.
You can also give them feedback about things that you like about your department. For example, if you like learning opportunities you can mention this. Your skip needs to know that these are the things teams find important in order to make sure that they keep happening. Do you like the team event that was organized? Did you like that you got to go to a conference? Mention the things that keep you motivated! This way they can make a point to keep doing those things. For example if you told them that you like the learning opportunities, they can make a point not try and not cut the budget for those since it keep folks happy to work at the company.
Ask for their help.
I’m going to split this into two parts.
First you can ask for their help in terms of your career progression. Talk about what your aspirations are and ask them how they see this playing out in your current role or organization. You should especially do this if you are in a position where you want to change either your job, your profile or you’re not sure if you want to stay with the company. The meeting with your skip level can be an opportunity to check how things will work out for you, if there are any new exciting projects that you can ask to be part of. You can also ask what the plans for the other teams in your department are so maybe you know that there will be a better opportunity for you there instead.
Of course, you can also ask them about their career progression and how that looked. This can give you a better idea of what certain decisions can get you down the line. You can ask them what were some of the best decisions they made in their career as well as what they most regret in their career or what they wish they had done. To be quite honest, I personally don’t index too much on these types of discussions since there is no guarantee that you will be faced with the same choices just because you have the same job type. However, this can prove to be a good frame of reference should you ever be in a remotely similar situation.
Secondly, ask for their help with larger scale issues that impact you. For example if you see that your department always has a tough working relationship with a different department or there is a large-scale misalignment going on, the 1 to 1 with your skip manager is the perfect opportunity to ask for help. For example if you are supporting a different department, you can ask your skip how the alignments with this department are made. When does it take place? Who is invited to decide how you will work together? Is your skip aware that the working relationship is not going so well? Can they intervene to help or are they already working on it?
Take the opportunity
I think the last section really transitions us well into one more thing to consider here: try to assess what you learn in your talks with your skip level in order to see if there are any immediate opportunities. Of course, as I mentioned in the previous section, you need to look out and ask for future opportunities. However, given the nature of the corporate world and the fact that changes generally take a long time (6 months, a year), future opportunities are not the only thing you should be looking out for. If you see that you skip is highlighting some issue in a process or program, try to ask yourself if this is something you could volunteer to fix. In the video on quiet quitting I said that there is no real promotion without a “quiet promotion” meaning you expand your work’s scope, your influence, the amount of projects that you work on, before there is an official promotion. In terms of identifying opportunities, there is no better pick of problems than something your skip manager says is a problem. You already know that this is important because leadership is mentioning it -this guarantees that the problem has both scope and visibility. So if we’re trying to make a promotion case for ourselves then really, there is no better pick of problems to solve than what your leadership is highlighting in these meetings. Working and potentially solving such a problem will definitely take your promotion from “might happen” to “we need to make this happen”.
That’s all for today, thanks for tuning in!
Until next time, this is Laura signing off.
