By week three the questions stop. Most managers read that as settling in. Often it is the opposite, and it is expensive.

You can read the health of a team in the first four minutes of a skip-level, by what people are willing to say when their manager is not in the room. Most leaders waste that signal. They treat the skip-level as a morale gesture, ask how things are going, get all good, and leave with nothing. The meeting that could have been the cheapest capability diagnostic they have becomes theatre. A skip-level is not a temperature check. It is a controlled experiment in whether the truth

Engagement can rise while your best people leave. Here's the leading indicator engagement scores miss, plus a 2-minute check to find your flight-risk quadrant.

Exit interviews blame pay. The data blames managers. Here's how to tell which is really driving your regretted attrition, plus a 2-minute diagnostic.