The Escalation That Should Have Stopped Two Levels Below You
Hello Learners,
This is Learn Leadership. Every issue takes one thing that quietly goes wrong between managers and their teams, shows it happening through a real story, and leaves you with something to try this week.
Today it's the decision that climbs the org chart until it lands on you, even though everyone below had the power to make it. You'll leave with a twenty-minute audit of your last ten escalations and one sentence that sends decisions back down.
Eleven days for an £1,800 refund
On a Wednesday in March, a refund request reached your inbox with three forwards stacked above it. A long-standing wholesale customer had received a pallet of damaged stock and asked for £1,800 back. They'd asked eleven days earlier.
They'd placed their next order with a competitor by the time you opened it. The buyer's last email, at the bottom of the thread, said they'd given up waiting.
Now, something to think about. Every person who forwarded it could have approved it. Maya, the support lead, could sign off refunds up to £2,500. So could Kofi, the operations manager, and Hana, the director. The decision passed three people with the authority to make it before it reached you.
So let's walk it backwards and find where it could have stopped.
Six weeks earlier
The thread starts in March, and the habit started in late January. A different customer asked for a smaller refund, £600. Kofi approved it on the spot, the way he was supposed to.
Two days later, in the weekly ops review, you asked why it had gone through without a damage report and reversed it in front of the team. You had a fair point about the report. Everyone in the room heard a different message: approve something on your own, and it might get undone in public.
Vince Molinaro, who advises leadership teams on accountability, describes this pattern in a Forbes piece on escalation cultures. When senior leaders keep solving problems that belong lower down, they train the organization to escalate. In this case, one reversal was enough.
The signal everyone saw and ignored
Between that review and the March refund, your inbox changed. Requests for a "quick approval" went from two or three a week to fourteen. Each one looked small and reasonable, and none of them needed you.
Your assistant mentioned it. Hana mentioned it too, half joking, in a one-on-one: "Everything's coming to you now." You took it as a sign the team was being careful.
The pattern costs more than one inbox. In a McKinsey survey on decision making, 61% of respondents said most of the time they spent on decisions was used ineffectively. Fourteen approvals a week that belonged two levels down is that time, landing on the person with the least context.
Molinaro's piece also lists the reasons managers give. Some escalate because the decision feels uncomfortable, some to avoid political friction, and some for cover from above. Your three forwarders managed one each.
The moment it was still fixable
Go back to day two. Maya sent the refund to Kofi with one line: "Happy to approve, but after January I'd rather you saw it." Kofi passed it to Hana because finance had been asking questions about refunds, and he didn't want that argument.
Hana held it for three days, then forwarded it on day six with "Your call?" If it went wrong, she wanted your name on it. It then sat behind thirteen other approvals for five more days.
The last fixable moment was day six. A one-line reply sending it back to Hana with "approve it, and this one's yours next time" would have saved the customer.
The earliest fixable moment was back in January. A quiet word with Kofi after that ops review about the damage report, with his approval left standing, would have kept every one of those fourteen weekly emails out of your inbox.
What you'd do differently
Write the limits down. One page covers it: who approves refunds, discounts, rota changes, and supplier credits, and up to what figure. When people have to guess their authority, they escalate to be safe.
When something arrives that belongs lower down, send it back the same day. Molinaro's line works well here: "That decision belongs at your level." Add the limit, and say you'll back whatever they decide inside it.
Ask for a recommendation with every escalation, something you can answer with yes or no. "Customer X, damaged pallet, £1,800, I recommend approving" takes ten seconds to read and keeps the thinking with the person who knows the case.
If you disagree with a call someone made inside their limit, tell them privately and let it stand. Fix the process for next time and leave their decision alone. The only exceptions are calls that are unsafe or unlawful.
Your version of this
Pull up your last ten escalations. For each one, write down a single thing: who below you already had the authority to decide it? It takes about twenty minutes, and you'll find a name next to more of them than you'd like.
Then pick the name that comes up most and have the conversation this week. Start with the decision you reversed, if there was one. That's usually where the habit began.
In the refund story, you had that conversation with Kofi in April. You told him the January reversal had been a mistake and that £600 refunds were his. The fourteen weekly emails were down to three by May. One of the three was a genuinely hard call, and that one was yours to make.
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