Org Chart Traversal — 3 Levels of Chain-of-Command

You're an HR analyst building a chain-of-command report for a small org chart. Columns A–B contain 8 employees with their direct manager (Alice is CEO — empty manager).

Your task — using VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP only (no PowerQuery, no PATH function):

1. In column C (L1 Manager) — return each employee's direct manager (this is identical to column B for non-CEO rows; for the CEO, return the string (none)).
2. In column D (L2 Skip-Level) — return the manager's manager. The trick: this is a VLOOKUP whose lookup key comes from column C, not column A. Where there's no skip-level (the L1 is the CEO), return (none).
3. In column E (L3 Skip-Skip) — same idea, one level deeper. Lookup key comes from column D.

Important: plain IFERROR(VLOOKUP(...), "(none)") is not enough. Alice's manager cell (B2) is blank, not missing — so VLOOKUP("Alice", ...) finds her row and returns an empty string. No error, IFERROR doesn't fire, and the cell shows up empty. You need to also test for the empty return — e.g., wrap with LET: =LET(m, XLOOKUP(<prev>, $A$2:$A$9, $B$2:$B$9, ""), IF(m="", "(none)", m)). The "" 4th arg to XLOOKUP handles "key not found" (when an upstream level already returned "(none)") and the IF handles "key found but cell is blank" (the CEO row).

The org tree:

Alice (CEO)
├── Bob
│   ├── Dan ── Grace
│   └── Eve ── Henry
└── Carol
    └── Frank

Graded cells: C2 (L1 of Alice → "(none)" — CEO boundary), C8 (L1 of Grace → Dan), D8 (L2 of Grace → Bob), E8 (L3 of Grace → Alice), C9 (L1 of Henry → Eve), D2 (L2 of Alice → "(none)"), E9 (L3 of Henry → Alice).