Body of Knowledge · Glossary
Skip-level
A regular one-on-one between a leader and the people who report to their reports. It exists for unfiltered signal about team health and to make the leader visibly accessible. It is never a channel for decisions that belong to the manager.
Where the standard develops it
- PL-2Feedback and difficult conversationsTimely, specific, behaviour-anchored, in both directions.
- PL-6Leading through leadersSelecting, developing, and holding accountable the managers who report to you.
Related terms
- Judgment debrief
- The form a one-on-one with a manager takes.
- Key-person risk
- Critical capability, context or ownership concentrated in one person, so that the organisation is destabilised when they leave or are courted.
- One-on-one
- The recurring, protected meeting between a manager and a report.
- Reaching around
- A leader of managers overriding a manager's decisions with that manager's own engineers, fixing their team's problems directly, or letting their escalations become the leader's workload.
- Readiness
- Already exercising the judgment of a larger scope on real stakes before holding the title.
- Situation, behaviour, impact
- A feedback structure that names the specific situation, describes the observable behaviour instead of inferred character, and states the impact.
- Span of control
- How many reports a leader can serve effectively.
- Succession
- A ready or nearly ready successor for every key role, the executive's own included, treated as an explicit expectation of senior roles and not as a personal virtue.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). Skip-level. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.skip-level). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/skip-level