Use when a senior manager wants candid feedback about team health, culture, and manager effectiveness from employees who report to their direct reports — to surface issues that would not otherwise reach them through normal reporting channels.
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Use when a senior manager wants candid feedback about team health, culture, and manager effectiveness from employees who report to their direct reports — to surface issues that would not otherwise reach them through normal reporting channels.
source
Scott "Radical Candor" (St. Martin's Press, 2017) — skip-level feedback practices; Slootman "Amp It Up" (Wiley, 2022); Google re:Work manager feedback methodology; SHRM upward feedback best practices
Conduct structured one-on-one conversations with employees who report to your direct reports — to hear candid assessments of team health and manager effectiveness that would not surface through normal reporting channels.
Why This Is Best Practice
Adopted by: Skip-level interviews are standard practice at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix; Kim Scott's "Radical Candor" framework requires skip-level listening as a check on whether direct reports are being candid with their own managers; Frank Slootman documents using skip-levels as a standard CEO and division president practice at ServiceNow and Snowflake to maintain organizational health signals; the US Army uses skip-level sensing through informal "command climate surveys" as a leadership tool at every echelon
Impact: Google's research on manager effectiveness (Project Oxygen) relied partly on upward feedback channels to identify what behaviors distinguished the highest-rated managers; McKinsey's 2021 organizational health research found that leaders who actively sought multi-level input were 2× more likely to identify performance-degrading cultural issues before they became structural; the primary organizational health risk identified in skip-levels is information that has already reached the senior manager's direct reports but has not been escalated — surfacing it creates an early-intervention window that does not exist without skip-level access
Information filters as it travels up reporting chains — direct reports tell managers what they think the manager wants to hear, or what they judge safe to share; this filtering is systematic, not random, and removes precisely the signals that would be most useful to senior leaders; the manager's skip-level reports are two information-filter layers away from the senior manager and have the most to gain from candid assessment of whether their direct manager is effective
Why best:
Sources: Scott "Radical Candor" (St. Martin's Press, 2017); Slootman "Amp It Up" (Wiley, 2022); Google re:Work "Guide: Identify What Makes a Great Manager"; SHRM "Upward Feedback" best practice guide
Steps
1. Set the purpose and protect the boundary
Skip-level interviews are a listening tool, not an investigation. State this explicitly when scheduling:
"I do skip-level conversations with everyone on the team — not to check
up on [manager's name], but because I want to hear directly from each of
you what's working, what's not, and what I might not be seeing from my
vantage point. This is confidential — I won't share specific things you
say with [manager's name] in a way that identifies you."
Two firm boundaries that must hold for skip-levels to produce candid information:
Not an investigation: if employees perceive you're looking for ammunition against their manager, they will either stay silent (protecting the manager) or fabricate problems (processing a grievance). Make clear you're listening broadly, not probing.
Confidentiality: if employees believe their candid answers will be shared with their direct manager, they will not be candid. Aggregated themes can be shared; attributed statements cannot.
2. Schedule the right cadence and scope
New senior managers: run skip-levels across the full team within the first 90 days. This establishes a baseline and signals that you listen at all levels.
Ongoing cadence: quarterly for direct-report managers who are new, underperforming, or managing through significant change; semi-annually for established, high-performing managers.
Format: 30–45 minutes, one-on-one, private. Group skip-level sessions produce social desirability bias — people say what the group norms allow, not what they actually think.
3. Ask questions that open rather than lead
The questions determine the quality of the data. Leading questions produce confirmation bias; open questions surface what you didn't know to ask about.
Opening:
"Tell me about what's going well for you right now — in your work, on the team."
Start positive. Employees who feel psychologically safe to share positives are more likely to surface problems.
Team health:
"What's working well about how your team operates?"
"What's one thing you wish worked differently on the team?"
"When you have a problem at work, how do you think about who to bring it to?"
Manager effectiveness:
"What does [manager] do that helps you do your best work?"
"Is there anything you wish [manager] would do more of, or differently?"
Note: do not ask "what does your manager do wrong?" — this frames the manager as the subject of an evaluation and produces defensiveness or grievance-venting rather than useful signal.
Organizational context:
"Is there anything I should know about that you think might not have
reached me — about the team, the work, or the culture?"
This is the most important question. It explicitly invites information to bypass the filter.
Closing:
"What's one thing I could do — or should know — that would make a
difference for you?"
4. Listen for themes, not incidents
Individual skip-level conversations produce anecdotes. Themes across multiple conversations produce signal.
Document after each conversation:
What is going well (be specific — these are things to reinforce)
What friction or concern was raised
Any "this might not have reached you" disclosures
After completing a round of skip-levels across a manager's team, synthesize the pattern:
Is a concern raised by one person? → note but treat cautiously
Raised by two or three independently? → significant signal worth addressing
Raised by all or most? → systemic issue requiring direct action
The individual conversation is data; the pattern across conversations is the finding.
5. Close the loop appropriately
With the employee: If they raised something actionable, follow up within 2 weeks. Even a brief message: "I heard what you said about [theme]. Here's what I'm doing with that." This signal — that the conversation wasn't performative — makes future skip-levels more candid.
With the manager: Debrief with the direct-report manager after completing their team's skip-levels. Aggregate, anonymize, and frame as development data:
"I finished the skip-levels with your team. I want to share some themes —
not specific quotes. The consistent strong themes were [X, Y].
One thing that came up more than once that I want to talk through with
you is [Z]. This isn't a judgment — I see it as something worth working
on together."
Never share attributed quotes. Never use skip-level data to build a performance case without separate documented evidence.
With yourself: What did you learn about your own management gaps? Skip-levels sometimes surface issues with how the senior manager is setting context — unclear strategy, inconsistent priorities, insufficient resources — that shows up as manager or team dysfunction downstream.
Rules
Confidentiality is non-negotiable — attributed skip-level quotes are never shared with the direct-report manager; violation destroys all future candor and signals that the tool is surveillance
Listen for themes, not incidents — one person raising a concern is an anecdote; three people raising the same concern independently is a pattern requiring action
Not an investigation — employees who sense the senior manager is looking for problems will distort their responses; frame as listening, not auditing
Act on what you hear — skip-levels where nothing changes produce employees who stop being candid; follow through closes the loop
Debrief with the manager, not about them — share patterns as development data, not as a performance report
Common Mistakes
Using skip-level information to build a case against a manager: this is the most damaging misuse — it creates a culture where employees won't be candid because they fear contributing to their manager's downfall.
Group skip-levels: group dynamics produce social conformity, not candor; individual conversations are required for honest signal.
Skipping the positive questions: opening with "what's not working?" primes the conversation for grievance rather than full picture; start with what's going well.
Running skip-levels only when something is wrong: reactive skip-levels are perceived as investigations; establishing them as a standard cadence makes them a cultural norm rather than a red flag.
Not closing the loop: employees who shared something and heard nothing back conclude that the senior manager's listening was performative; they disengage from future skip-levels.
When NOT to Use
During an active HR investigation involving the manager — skip-level conversations during an investigation are discoverable and confuse the investigation process; work with HR to keep these separate.
As a substitute for the direct-report manager's own employee feedback mechanisms — skip-levels supplement upward feedback, they do not replace the manager's responsibility to seek feedback directly from their own team.
