We ran skip-level 1:1s badly for two years. They drifted into status updates, or they became grievance intake, or they quietly disappeared from calendars. Last spring we rebuilt the format. Thirty minutes, every eight weeks, two questions, and nothing gets written down as an action item while the meeting is happening. It has held up across three quarters.
The format
Each engineering director meets with every report of their direct reports on a rolling eight-week cadence. Meetings sit on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoons, never Monday, never Friday. The invite goes out from Notion with a two-line agenda and a note that says: no prep required, no slides, camera on.
We ask the same two questions every time:
- What is something your manager is doing well that you want them to keep doing?
- What is one thing that would make your next eight weeks better, and who owns it?
That is the whole script. The rest of the thirty minutes is follow-up, tangents, and listening. We used to open with “how are things going,” which produced thirty minutes of pleasant nothing.
Why we banned in-meeting action items
The old version of this meeting generated a Linear ticket or two per session, which felt productive and taught everyone the wrong lesson. People started curating what they said based on what they wanted to see filed. The signal degraded.
Now the director takes no notes in the room. After the meeting, they spend ten minutes writing a private summary in Notion, then decide what, if anything, becomes a follow-up. Sometimes it is a Linear ticket. Sometimes it is a quiet word with the manager. Sometimes it is nothing, and that is the correct answer.
The best skip-level we ran last quarter produced zero tickets and one changed mind about a promotion case.
What we track
We keep a single Notion database with one row per skip-level. Fields are minimal:
- Date and attendees.
- A one-sentence temperature reading: green, yellow, or red.
- A private summary field, visible only to the director and their manager.
Two yellows in a row on the same manager triggers a conversation between the director and that manager within the week. Three reds anywhere in a quarter goes to the head of engineering. We have used the red rule twice. Both times it caught something we would have missed for another two months.
The point of a skip-level is not information. It is trust. Thirty minutes, two questions, and the discipline to stop writing tickets long enough to hear the answer.