What skip-levels are actually for

Most engineering leaders run skip-levels to check in on team health and give people access to leadership. Both are legitimate. Neither is the primary value.

The primary value of a skip-level is signal that doesn't reach the senior leader through normal channels. Direct reports filter what they tell their manager. Managers filter what they tell their skip. By the time information reaches two levels up, it's been processed through two layers of editorial judgment. Skip-levels bypass that filtering — if the conversation is structured to enable honesty, which most skip-level templates are not.

The structural error is asking questions that invite agreement. "Are you happy here?" invites "yes." "Does your manager support your growth?" invites "yeah, they're great." The questions that produce signal are specific and concrete: "Tell me about a decision in the last three months you disagreed with but didn't push back on." "What's something you think isn't working that you haven't raised with your manager?" Those questions are harder to answer, and harder to ask.

The agenda (copy-paste this)

Duration: 30–45 minutes
Format: 1:1 between senior leader and individual contributor; not recorded by default (ask first)

Section 1 — Career and growth (10 min)

Where do you want to be in 12–18 months?
What skills are you developing right now? What's getting in the way?
Are there opportunities you want that you haven't had access to?
The senior leader's role here is to listen and note specific asks, not to evaluate or respond in the moment

Section 2 — Team and environment feedback (10 min)

What's working well on the team that you'd want to protect?
What's something that could be better that you haven't had the right opening to raise?
Tell me about a recent decision you disagreed with — you don't have to name people
Is there anything you think your manager doesn't know about that I should know?
Listen for specifics; generalities can be followed up on, but specifics are where the real signal is

Section 3 — Org direction questions (10 min)

What questions do you have about where the team or company is going?
What would you want me to know about how strategy decisions land at the IC level?
Is there anything about the org that feels inconsistent or confusing from where you sit?
Answer what you can; be honest about what you can't share; note what you'll follow up on

Section 4 — Senior leader follow-up (5 min)

Name one specific thing the senior leader will do based on this conversation — not "I'll look into that," but a concrete action with a timeline
If nothing actionable surfaced, say that explicitly: "I didn't hear anything that needs a specific response, but I want to hear from you again in [timeframe]"
Confirm how feedback will be handled — specifically, will any of this be attributed to the individual?

What most skip-level templates miss

Generic skip-level templates are essentially 1:1 templates run by a different person. That's useful but misses the skip-level's distinctive purpose: getting unfiltered signal from a level that doesn't normally have access to the senior leader.

The first thing templates miss is question design. Open-ended questions about happiness and growth are easy to answer positively and produce little signal. Behaviorally-specific questions — "tell me about a time when" — are harder to answer and produce the concrete examples that are actually informative. Senior leaders who run skip-levels with generic questions find that every conversation sounds similar: engaged, positive, with minor suggestions. The signal that would actually change something never surfaces.

The second thing templates miss is the follow-up commitment at the end. Skip-levels that end with "thanks, this was helpful" and no named action teach the organization that senior leaders listen but don't act. After a few cycles, ICs stop saying anything real in skip-levels because it doesn't go anywhere. The follow-up commitment is what makes the format trustworthy, and it has to be specific enough to verify — not "I'll think about it" but "I'm going to raise the deployment frequency question with the platform lead by end of next week."

The cost of senior leaders who are out of signal contact with the IC layer shows up in retention and culture metrics before it shows up in code quality. The meeting tax covers how unaddressed communication gaps accumulate into structural overhead.

How Pavleur handles skip-level notes

Skip-level notes are sensitive by nature: they may contain feedback about specific managers or team dynamics that shouldn't be widely distributed. The question of what gets written down, and where, is real.

The standard approach is no notes at all, or informal personal notes that never get referenced. Neither works well when the senior leader has six skip-levels a week across 30 ICs. The context needed to identify patterns — "three different engineers have mentioned the same deployment process frustration in the last month" — doesn't exist because there's no systematic record.

Pavleur generates the skip-level report automatically after the call, capturing topics discussed, specific examples raised, follow-up commitments made, and questions the senior leader agreed to answer. Visual context from screen shares — an org chart discussed, a career ladder pulled up — is included. The report is the senior leader's record; it doesn't automatically go anywhere else. Audio-only tools lose the specifics that matter most, and with no visual context for referenced documents. For how this compares to other capture approaches: Pavleur vs. alternatives.

On frequency and attribution

Quarterly skip-levels are the minimum for maintaining real signal. Monthly is better if the skip covers more than eight or nine ICs. Annual skip-levels might as well not exist — the relationship doesn't form, and nobody says anything real to a senior leader they see once a year.

Attribution is a real concern. If skip-level feedback reliably gets back to the direct manager, people stop saying real things. The senior leader should be explicit upfront about what is and isn't shared, and should be honest when they need to act on something that will reveal the source. Most ICs prefer that over finding out later.