A meeting between an employee and their manager's manager (skipping the direct manager). Skip-levels serve two functions: they give senior leaders a less-filtered view of what's happening on the ground, and they give employees a channel to surface issues their direct manager can't or won't escalate. Skip-levels work best when they're routine (not crisis-driven), explicitly not for performance feedback about the direct manager (which would poison the dynamic), and short — 20-30 minutes is usually plenty. Many organizations institutionalize skip-levels as a quarterly or biannual rhythm. AI meeting copilots help skip-levels by producing a low-friction record of recurring themes across many one-off conversations — patterns that are invisible in any single meeting but obvious across twenty.