How to manage your skip - playbook

You relationship with you skip is key to your long term success in the organization. Your skip has wider visibility of the organization, they know what is brewing in the 6 month, 1 year horizon and can fast track your career when you might start feeling to get stalled. 

Here are the top few things that your skip cares about

1. What is your brand, who you are as a person, where are you at and where do you want to go and how can you help your skip.
2. Ask them what their top 5 priorities are, what gets them up from bed every morning - aspiration and what keeps them awake at night - headaches. See how you can position your team in those top priorities. 
3. Understand their people plans, who are the key people who they are investing on and how can you be one of those who they invest on. 
4. It is always important to talk about your medium/long term ambitions with your skip so that he is aware. You need to always let them know that you can take on more. Key to doing that is delegating and setting current things up well and taking on more by doing additional org impact. From your skips perspective, they are always thinking that how can I take on more and who are the people who can help me deliver. A lot of the higher level decisions will happen when you wont even know and these conversations will set you up for being considered for those roles. 
5. You should talk to your skip about organization health, if you notice group dynamics, conflicts arising in the organization, it is your responsibility to let your skip know and help them build the organization.
6. If you have a plan on managing up beyond your chain, that is something that you can share and get buyin with your skip. These are all examples of good agenda items. This is where your skip can help you gain broader organizational visibility. 

Things your skip doesn't care about

1. Dont waste time talking to your skip about projects, that is your managers job and your skip expects your manager to take care of it