The Impromptu Skip-Level Meeting: What It Signals and What To Do
For managers who have just found out their boss arranged to meet their team without them. A framework for reading the signals clearly and deciding what to do next.
By Shirisha Nagendran · ICF PCC Executive Coach
This guide is for people who manage a team and have just found out that their boss has arranged to meet that team without them present, and something about it seems off.
How you found out varies. Your boss may have told you directly, before or after the meeting, as a matter of courtesy. A team member may have mentioned it in passing. You may have seen a calendar invite or an email not intended for you. If you found out accidentally, you might be unsure as to what to do with the information and that can be stressful. Either way, something is going on, you do not have full information and are unclear on what to do next.
Skip-level meetings are a normal part of how many organisations run. They happen on a planned cadence, organisation-wide or department-wide, or your boss may have set an expectation with you that they will meet your team periodically. When a skip-level meeting sits within that rhythm, it is doing what it says it is doing. In many organisations, though there is a process in place, regular skip meetings are not very common.
When the skip meeting has been arranged outside of the known cadence or behaviour, or when it is happening to your team and not to your peers who report to the same boss, that is a different situation. This guide is about that situation: the skip-level meeting that comes as a surprise, that is not uniformly applied, whose intent is unclear and where you are not sure what is happening or what to do next.
When a skip-level meeting with your team happens on cadence, where your boss has been transparent about the purpose and the conversation is an ongoing part of building your capability and leadership, that is a different question and is not covered here. For background on what a skip-level meeting is and the distinction between a scheduled and an impromptu one, the article "What Is a Skip-Level Meeting?" covers both.
Before you go into an anxiety loop, talk to your boss
Before you work through the signals below, there is a more direct step available to you. If the skip-level meeting has arrived outside the normal rhythm and its purpose has not been explained to you, you can ask.
This is a straightforward option, and yet many people hesitate to do so because they do not want a confrontation and so never exercise it.
If you found out accidentally, you may need a little time before you have that conversation. Going to your boss while you are still absorbing the information and in the heat of anger, or before you have decided what you want out of that conversation, is unlikely to go well. Give yourself enough space to be steady before you initiate it.
This is a professional conversation, not a confrontation. You are a manager who has just found out that your boss has met your team without you, and it is reasonable and professional to find out what is happening. The questions worth asking are:
- What prompted this, and why now?
- Is this happening with other teams at my level, or is it specific to mine?
- What were you hoping to find out?
- How do you intend to work through whatever came out of the conversation?
- How and when will the feedback be shared with me?
- Was there someone in the room to document the conversation, and if not, how is it being recorded?
If the meeting has not yet happened, these questions help you understand the context and intent, and give you time to prepare your next steps. This conversation also gives you a chance to be proactive and a step ahead by establishing that you expect to be kept in the loop about a process that directly concerns you.
How your boss responds to these questions is as important as what they say. A clear, direct account of the purpose and the plan is one kind of response. Vagueness, deflection, or discomfort with the questions is another. Both are data points that feed directly into the signal-reading that follows.
If the conversation goes well and the answers are clear and coherent, much of the analysis below may become less urgent. If it does not, the signals section gives you a framework for inferring what the conversation itself was telling you.
Relational signals
No single signal is conclusive. What matters is whether they cluster, and whether you are reading them accurately.
Ferris and colleagues, in their research on organisational politics, found that politically skilled individuals are socially astute. They read people and situations accurately, and they adjust how they engage based on what they observe. That capacity does not switch off under pressure. If anything, it matters more when the situation is difficult and the pressure to jump to conclusions is highest. It also applies inward, not just outward. Reading your own situation clearly is part of the same skill as reading the organisation around you.
The relational signals ask you to look at what has been happening between you and your team. They ask you to look honestly at yourself. That is different from looking for reasons to blame or defend yourself. The purpose of these questions is clarity, not a verdict on who you are as a manager. You are trying to build an accurate map, not to confirm an extreme worst-case reading of your own leadership.
This kind of analysis is harder to do alone, and many senior leaders who work with an executive coach find that it gets easier in a safe space with a trusted thinking partner. The structure below is designed to help you do it as rigorously as possible on your own, by separating what you observe from what you infer, and by asking you to test your inferences before you act on them.
Your relationship with your team
Reflect: How would you describe the current state of your relationship with your team, honestly? Is there trust? Is there distance? Are there individuals you have a stronger relationship with than others?
Observe: Think back over the last three to six months. Have team members come to you with concerns, or has communication been mostly task-focused? Have you had conversations that seemed uncomfortable or unresolved? Have you noticed anyone withdrawing? Are there elephants in the room that you have not addressed? (Like layoffs, people issues, unacceptable behaviour, no bonus or hike, regular stretching by the team, working over weekends.)
Infer: A team that has been engaged and communicative is a different starting point from one where there has been distance, tension, or undercurrents. Assess how the team might be experiencing you as their manager and leader. This gives you a clue about the possible reactions or conversations in the skip-level meeting. Either picture is possible. Neither tells you on its own what the skip-level meeting is about.
Triangulate: Cross-reference what you observe in your day-to-day interactions with what you know about the individuals involved. Are there people on your team who tend to escalate, or who have done so before? Is the distance you notice specific to certain people or across the board?
Hard decisions you have taken recently
Reflect: Have you made any significant decisions in the last six to twelve months that affected your team and may not have landed well? Redundancies, restructuring, changes to someone's role, performance managing someone, withdrawing something the team relied on.
Observe: Note what the decision was, when it was made, how it was communicated, and what the visible response was at the time. Note also whether there was a response that surprised you, or one you expected but did not fully address.
Infer: A hard decision that was handled well may still have left residue with the team. A decision that was not communicated clearly, or that was experienced as unfair, is more likely to have produced lasting disaffection. Your boss hearing about a difficult decision through your team is different from your boss commissioning a meeting to investigate it.
Triangulate: Consider whether the timing of the skip-level meeting maps to the decision. Consider also whether the people who were most affected by the decision are the people included in the meeting.
Undercurrents you have noticed and set aside
Reflect: Are there things you have noticed in your team, dynamics, tensions, complaints, patterns of behaviour, that you registered but did not act on? A comment that seemed pointed, a meeting that went flat, a team member who has been less engaged than usual. Have you rescheduled or cancelled one-on-ones with your team members frequently? Have you snapped or reacted at your team members more often than you normally do?
Observe: Write down what you noticed and when. Note whether you followed up, and if not, why not.
Infer: Undercurrents that are noticed and addressed are different from ones that accumulate without acknowledgement. If there have been signals from your team that you have not responded to, your boss may be responding to those signals now.
Triangulate: Ask yourself whether the undercurrents you noticed were isolated or part of a pattern. Ask whether the people at the centre of those undercurrents are the people in this meeting.
When you last asked your team for feedback
Reflect: When did you last explicitly invite feedback from your team on how you are working together, on your leadership, on what they need from you?
Observe: Note the last time you asked, what you asked, and what came back. Note also whether you acted on any of it, and whether your team would know that you did.
Infer: A manager who regularly asks for feedback and acts on it has a different relationship with their team than one who does not. If your team has had concerns that were never addressed or invited out, a skip-level meeting is one way those concerns surface.
Triangulate: Consider whether the feedback you have received formally, through performance reviews or surveys, matches what you know informally. Gaps between the two are worth examining.
Your presence with your team
Reflect: Have you been consistently present with your team? Have you been holding your one-on-ones? Have you been available when people needed you, or have you been stretched, distracted, or absent?
Observe: Think back over the last quarter. How many one-on-ones were cancelled or postponed, and by whom? Have team members had to chase you for responses or decisions? Has your workload or your own situation changed in ways that have affected your availability? Have you been setting reasonable deadlines, or have people been consistently stretched beyond what is manageable? Have there been signs of tension within the team, between individuals, or between parts of the team, that you have not addressed?
Infer: Consistent absence from one-on-ones or low availability is something teams notice and respond to. It can produce disengagement, frustration, or a sense that they are not being managed. It can also be what prompts a boss to check in.
Triangulate: Check your calendar. The record is objective. Cross-reference it with your sense of how your team has been responding to you.
Organisational signals
Working through the relational signals is challenging and can send you down a rabbit hole of judgement. Noticing things about your own leadership that may have contributed to this situation is not the same as concluding that the skip-level meeting is entirely about finding fault with you. What happens around you in the organisation also matters equally. Both sets of observations belong in the picture.
Your relationship with your boss
Reflect: How would you describe the current state of your relationship with your boss? Has it been consistent, or has something shifted? Are there things that have gone unsaid between you?
Observe: When did you last have a substantive one-on-one with your boss? Has the quality or frequency of those conversations changed? Has there been a specific moment of disagreement, tension, or distance that has not been resolved?
Infer: A skip-level meeting that arrives when the relationship with your boss is strong and communicative is a different situation from one that arrives when there has been distance or unresolved tension. The state of the relationship between you and your boss affects both what the meeting might be about and what interpretations could be drawn from what your team members say or do not say in the meeting.
Triangulate: Consider whether the shift in your boss's behaviour, if there has been one, predates the skip-level meeting or followed something specific. Consider also whether your boss has mentioned any concerns about your team or your leadership in recent conversations.
Timing
Reflect: When was the meeting called, and relative to what? Note the date and note what else was happening around that time. Is your boss new to the organisation or new to this role? If so, skip-levels may be part of how they are getting to know the landscape broadly. If they are not new, when did you last have a substantive conversation with them about your team, and has anything in that relationship shifted recently?
Observe: Was there a significant disagreement with your boss in the weeks before? A decision you agreed to disagree on? A structural change above your level that has not yet stabilised? A budget conversation that created a few tense exchanges? Is this happening at a point in the year when reviews or planning cycles might explain it? Has your boss done this before, with this team or others?
Infer: A skip-level meeting that maps closely to a specific event is worth examining. A skip-level meeting that fits a known cadence or review point is less likely to be a response to something specific.
Triangulate: Cross-reference the timing with your relational signals. If something happened between you and your boss at around the same time as something happened between you and your team, the two may be connected.
Scope
Reflect: Who was invited to the meeting? Was it your full team, or selected members?
Observe: If selected, note who was included and who was not. Note what you know about those individuals, their relationship with your boss, their relationship with you, and whether any of them have been at the centre of recent tensions or decisions.
Infer: A meeting with selected members has a different purpose from one with the full team. The selection may reflect who is expected to have relevant observations. It may reflect something about what the meeting was set up to find. Both are possible.
Triangulate: Cross-reference the selection with your relational signals. Are the people included the ones you would expect to have the most to say, or is the selection surprising in some way?
Framing
Reflect: How was the meeting described when you first heard about it? Write down the exact words used.
Observe: Note how the outputs are characterised when you hear about them afterwards. A conversation described as "a general check-in" may be summarised to you as "some concerns came up." It may be summarised the same way it was described. Note the difference, if there is one.
Infer: A shift in language between the invitation and the debrief may indicate that the meeting served a different purpose from the one stated. It may also reflect imprecise communication rather than intent.
Triangulate: Hold the language against the other signals. A shift in framing that sits alongside unusual timing, unusual scope, and a strained relationship with your boss carries more weight than a shift in framing on its own.
Who was in the room
Reflect: Find out, where you can, who else was present besides your boss and your team. Was anyone there to take notes or observe?
Observe: If someone was present, note who they were. Someone from HR, an independent facilitator, a colleague of your boss, someone else. Note what their relationship to your boss is and whether their presence is consistent with how these meetings are normally run in your organisation.
Infer: The presence of a third party may indicate that the meeting was being formally documented. Who that third party is affects how neutral that documentation is likely to be. The absence of a third party means the account of the conversation belongs to your boss alone.
Triangulate: Ask a team member who was there. Note how easily the answer comes, and whether different team members give you consistent accounts of who was present.
Notification
Reflect: How did you find out about the meeting, and when?
Observe: Did your boss tell you directly, before it happened? After? Did you find out through a team member, a calendar invite, or an email not meant for you? Is this consistent with how your boss normally handles things that affect you and your team?
Infer: How you were notified, relative to what is normal in your organisation and in your relationship with your boss, tells you something about how much transparency is being extended to you in this process.
Triangulate: Cross-reference with your relational signal on the state of your relationship with your boss. A boss who has been less communicative recently, and who also did not notify you directly, is a different picture from a boss who is generally transparent and simply handled this one badly.
What else is shifting
Reflect: What else has changed in how you are being managed at the same time as the skip-level meeting?
Observe: Has a formal 360 been commissioned recently? Has HR been more present in conversations about your role than usual? Have decisions that would normally involve you been made around you? Has the quality of your boss's engagement with your work changed? Have you been excluded from meetings or communications you would normally be part of?
Infer: The skip-level meeting on its own is one data point. Multiple things shifting simultaneously suggests something has changed in how your position is being read above you, whether that is the result of a deliberate process or several people responding independently to the same situation.
Triangulate: Pfeffer's research on organisational power is useful here. Power shifts when dependencies change. When multiple signals occur simultaneously, they may reflect a coordinated process or independent responses to the same pressure. Reading them together, rather than treating each one separately, gives you a clearer picture of what you are inside.
The India and GCC dimension
Power distance creates a specific dynamic in skip-level meetings that is worth understanding on its own terms.
Hofstede's Power Distance Index places India at 77, compared to the UK at 35. In a high PDI culture, when a very senior person requests time with your team, the act of requesting it carries implicit authority regardless of how the invitation is framed. Your team members are being asked by someone whose seniority makes it difficult, culturally, to say less than what is expected.
This creates a specific dynamic. If your boss conducting the skip-level meeting has, consciously or not, signalled what they are looking for, through the framing of their questions, through their body language, through the topics they return to, your team members in a high PDI context will read that signal and respond to it. The response comes through the deeply embedded social intelligence that high power distance cultures develop: the ability to read what authority wants and to give it.
The result is feedback that looks, on paper, like independent corroboration from multiple sources. It may be, in part, a distributed reflection of one person's expectations, expressed through many voices that did not feel free to say otherwise. It could also turn into an echo chamber.
For women in GCC or India-based roles within multinational organisations, Joan Williams's research on gender and leadership adds a further layer. Williams documents that the threshold for informally investigating a woman's leadership is lower than it is for her male peers. The casual check-in that becomes a pattern of undocumented information gathering happens more frequently, and with less justification required, when the leader in question is a woman. By the time it surfaces in a formal process, it has already been shaped into the appearance of independent evidence from multiple sources. In a high PDI context, where that gathering is further amplified by cultural deference to seniority, the resulting feedback can look like consensus when it is something closer to convergence around a signal.
The person conducting the skip-level meeting may also have limited direct visibility of your day-to-day work, limited understanding of the local context in which you operate, and primary access to you through the very relationships they are now consulting. The feedback they receive may confirm what they already had limited capacity to interrogate.
Pulling it together: questions to ask yourself before you act
Once you have worked through the relational and organisational signals, the purpose is not to have a complete picture. You will rarely have that. The purpose is to have an honest working picture of what is happening.
What seems to be the intent behind this skip-level meeting?
Based on everything you have observed and reflected on, what is your current read of why this meeting was called? Is it most consistent with a boss testing a hypothesis they are genuinely uncertain about? A boss looking to confirm a view they have already formed? A response to something specific that has happened, whether in your relationship with your team or in your relationship with your boss? Poor or reactive management of a situation that needed more care? Hold your answer loosely. You may need to revise it as more information comes in.
What are the known, factually corroborated factors that could be contributing to this?
Set aside what you suspect and focus on what you can point to concretely. Are there specific incidents, decisions, or conversations that you know have not landed well? Is there a pattern in your team's engagement that you can observe, not just interpret? Is there something in your relationship with your boss that has shifted in a way that is observable, not just felt? These are the factors you can work with directly, regardless of what else is driving the skip-level meeting.
What may be driving this that has not been made explicit?
What are the undercurrents? Things you have noticed but cannot confirm, dynamics you sense but have not named, pressures above your boss's level that may be coming down, relationships or histories you are aware of but that have never been part of a direct conversation. These are not things to act on, but they are things to hold as context. They shape how you read what happens next.
What do you still not know, and how will you find out?
Where are the gaps in your picture? What would change your current read if you knew it? And what is the most direct, professional way to get that information, whether through the conversation with your boss, through what you observe in the debrief, or through other signals that are still to come?
If you have worked through these questions and find you have more uncertainty than clarity, or that the process is producing anxiety rather than insight, that is worth paying attention to. This kind of analysis is genuinely difficult to do alone, particularly when you are inside the situation you are trying to read. Working through it with a coach, someone who can hold the questions with you without a stake in the answers, tends to produce a clearer picture faster. If that is where you are, the Political Intelligence Audit is designed for exactly this situation.
What to do
If you learn the meeting is being scheduled
Document. Before the meeting happens, write down the current state of your relationships with your team as you understand them. Note any conversations where concerns were raised and how they were addressed. Note any conversations where you received positive feedback or acknowledgement. Date it. Keep it somewhere only you can access. If the outputs of the skip meeting later describe a situation you do not recognise, you will have a contemporaneous account of what you observed. If they surface concerns you do recognise, you will have a record of how you responded to them.
You can also ask your boss, professionally and directly, what the meeting is for and whether there are specific concerns you should be aware of. The response, or the absence of one, will tell you something about how this is being handled.
Do not brief your team. Do not signal, even subtly, that this meeting is something to approach with caution. It puts them in an impossible position, and it creates a dynamic that can be used to characterise you as interfering with a legitimate management process.
If you learn the meeting has already happened
Ask your boss, in writing if possible, for a summary of the key themes from the meeting and any specific concerns raised. The quality and specificity of the response will tell you a great deal about whether this is being handled as a developmental conversation or as documentation of a position already taken.
If specific concerns are attributed to your team, ask for specifics. What specifically was said? In what context? By whom, if they are willing to be identified? This applies whether or not you recognise the concerns. If you do recognise them, the specifics help you understand the extent and what to address. If you do not, they help you establish whether the characterisation is accurate. Document the debrief conversation after it ends. Note what was said, what was not said, and how the concerns were framed.
In either case, read the cluster
The skip-level meeting's significance depends on what is sitting alongside it. A skip-level meeting that stands alone, with no other shifts in how you are being managed, is a different situation from one that arrives alongside a 360, a change in your boss's engagement, or decisions being made around you. Reading the cluster tells you what kind of situation you are in, which in turn tells you what kind of response is needed.
The first guide in this series, Is Your 360 Feedback Politically Motivated?, gives you the full diagnostic framework for reading whether a formal feedback process is being used developmentally or politically. Once you have reached a conclusion about what you are inside, 360 Feedback Is Political: What to Do Next covers what to do about it.
360 Feedback Series
Guide 1: Is Your 360 Feedback Politically Motivated? — the diagnostic framework, covering all four instruments and the mechanism underneath.
Guide 2: 360 Feedback Is Political: What to Do Next — what to do once you have reached a conclusion.
Guide 3 (this guide): The Impromptu Skip-Level Meeting: What It Signals and What To Do.
Guide 4: How to Respond to a Performance Improvement Plan When the Politics Are Clear. (Coming soon)
Guide 5: Leaving on Your Own Terms. (Coming soon)
A note on staying in your own power
You find out the meeting happened. You do not know what was said. You are waiting for the debrief, or the debrief has been vague, and you are left holding uncertainty about what your team told your boss about your leadership.
That uncertainty can be destabilising. What it can trigger is a shift in how you relate to your team. You begin reading every interaction for evidence of who said what. You treat people who may have had nothing to say as potential informants. You become, in the process, less present and less effective as a manager, which is its own problem regardless of what prompted the skip-level meeting in the first place.
Ferris's research on political skill is clear that social astuteness is not diminished by a difficult situation. It is the capacity to read accurately when the pressure to misread is highest. That means reading the situation clearly: what the signals are telling you, what your own conduct has contributed, what your boss is likely responding to, and what kind of process you are inside. It also means continuing to lead your team from that clarity rather than from the anxiety the uncertainty produces. Do the analytical work, the documentation, the questions, the reading of the cluster, separately from your day-to-day leadership, so that the two do not contaminate each other.
A note on legal advice
This guide addresses the political and organisational dimensions of the skip-level meeting. It is not legal advice. If you believe your situation may constitute grounds for a formal employment dispute, seek independent legal advice from a qualified employment solicitor in your jurisdiction.
Frequently asked questions
The questions most people bring after reading this guide.
What does it mean when my boss meets my team without me?
A skip-level meeting with your team is not automatically a warning sign. When it sits within an established cadence or has been clearly explained in advance, it is doing what it says. When it arrives outside the normal rhythm, affects only your team and not your peers', and has not been explained to you, it is a different situation. The guide covers how to read which one you are in by working through relational signals (what has been happening between you and your team) and organisational signals (what is happening around you in the organisation).
Is an impromptu skip-level meeting always a sign something is wrong?
Not automatically. A new boss familiarising themselves with the organisation, a company-wide culture initiative, or a project debrief can all look like an impromptu skip-level. The question is whether the meeting is uniformly applied across teams at your level or specific to yours; whether you were informed in advance or found out afterwards; and whether the explanation matches the observable pattern. A single signal is rarely conclusive. It is the cluster that tells you what kind of situation you are in.
What should I ask my boss after a skip-level meeting with my team?
Ask directly what the meeting was for and what prompted it now. Specific questions worth raising: what themes came out of the conversation; whether any specific concerns were raised; how and when you will be briefed; who was present to document the conversation; and whether this is happening with other teams at your level. How your boss responds is as important as what they say. Clear, direct answers are one kind of response. Vagueness, discomfort, or deflection is another. Both are data that feed into your reading of the situation.
Should I say anything to my team before or after a skip-level meeting?
Do not brief your team before the meeting, even subtly. It puts them in an impossible position and can be characterised as interference with a legitimate management process. After the meeting, you can acknowledge in ordinary conversation that your boss has been in touch with the team as part of normal leadership oversight. What you want to avoid is signalling, however indirectly, that you regard the meeting as something they should have approached with caution.
I found out about the skip-level meeting by accident. Does that change how I should read it?
How you found out is itself one of the organisational signals in this guide. In most organisations, a leader being informed of a skip-level meeting with their team is basic professional courtesy. When you find out by accident, through a team member mentioning it in passing, a calendar invite you were not meant to see, or an email not intended for you, that is information about how much transparency is being extended to you in this process. It does not tell you why the meeting was called, but it tells you something about how the process is being managed. It belongs in the cluster you are reading.
How does the Hofstede Power Distance Index affect skip-level meetings in India and the GCC?
Geert Hofstede's Power Distance Index measures how readily less powerful members of an organisation accept and expect unequal power distribution. India sits at 77; the UK at 35. In a high PDI context, when a very senior person requests time with your team, the act of requesting carries implicit authority regardless of how the invitation is framed. Team members in a high PDI culture have a highly developed ability to read what authority expects and to respond to it. This means that feedback gathered in a skip-level can look like independent corroboration from multiple sources when it may be a distributed reflection of one person's framing, expressed through many voices that did not feel free to say otherwise.
How do I know if what I am reading from the skip-level is accurate or just anxiety?
The framework in this guide is designed to separate what you observe from what you infer. The relational signals ask you to look honestly at your own conduct: the state of your team relationships, the decisions you have made, the undercurrents you have noticed. The organisational signals ask you to look at what is happening around you: your relationship with your boss, the timing, who was in the room, what else is shifting. Anxiety produces conclusions from single data points. This framework asks you to read the cluster before drawing a conclusion, and to test each inference against what you can actually observe.
What is the difference between a scheduled and an impromptu skip-level meeting?
A scheduled skip-level sits within a known cadence: regular meetings your boss has with all teams at your level, a company-wide practice, or an expectation your boss set with you when they started. When a skip-level sits within that rhythm, it is likely doing what it says. An impromptu skip-level is called outside that cadence, in response to a specific situation, and often affects only your team. The impromptu skip-level is harder to ignore precisely because it is unusual. The timing is itself a signal, and it is one that the people being asked to attend will also have noticed.
Explore Other Guides
More from the Political Literacy series
Is Your 360 Feedback Politically Motivated?
The diagnostic framework for reading whether a formal feedback process is being used developmentally or politically. Covers the four instruments, the signals that distinguish them, including the impromptu skip-level, and the cultural dimensions specific to India and the GCC.
Read the guide →360 Feedback Is Political: What to Do Next
What to do when you have read the signals and concluded that a formal feedback process is being used against you. Covers documentation, composure, managing your relationships, the conversations that matter, and how to stay in your own power while the process runs.
Read the guide →Organisation Politics 101: Reading Power at Work
The foundational framework for reading how power moves through your organisation. Covers the formal and informal systems, stakeholder mapping, the players who hold influence without the title, and how decisions actually get made. The prerequisite that makes everything in this guide make deeper sense.
Read the guide →Why Authentic Expression Backfires at Work
Why speaking your truth at work often backfires, the five structural reasons it goes wrong, and how to say difficult things in a way that can actually be heard. Covers the NVC framework, RAIN, and the gap between what you mean and what lands.
Read the guide →When Your PIP Is Political: How to Respond
A PIP in workplace politics is not just a performance document. Shirisha Nagendran on how to read it carefully, respond precisely, and keep your options open.
Read the guide →Leaving on Your Own Terms for Senior Leaders
A political literacy guide for senior leaders on exiting with agency. Timing, what to negotiate, how to shape the narrative, and what you carry forward.
Read the guide →Stay in the Loop
If this guide was useful, the newsletter goes deeper. Practical thinking on political literacy, leadership, and the realities of working life, for senior and mid-career professionals.
References
Cohen, M. D., March, J. G. and Olsen, J. P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(1), 1--25.
Ferris, G. R., Treadway, D. C., Kolodinsky, R. W., Hochwarter, W. A., Kacmar, C. J., Douglas, C. and Frink, D. D. (2005). Development and validation of the political skill inventory. Journal of Management, 31(1), 126--152.
Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations. Sage Publications.
Pfeffer, J. (1981). Power in Organisations. Pitman Publishing.
Williams, J. C. (2014). What Works for Women at Work. NYU Press.