When Everything Gets Escalated, Nobody Really Owns Anything

Senior leaders frequently complain that decisions keep being escalated.

• “Why is this coming to me?”
• “They should be able to make this decision.”
• “We need people to take more ownership.”

Usually, the frustration is reasonable. A relatively ordinary operational decision has travelled through three levels of management and arrived on the desk of someone who knows considerably less about the issue than the people asking them to decide it.

The obvious conclusion is that managers need to become more decisive. Perhaps. But there is another possibility worth considering.

Escalation may not be evidence that people are unwilling to take ownership. It may be evidence that the organisation has taught them not to.

ESCALATION IS OFTEN RATIONAL

Imagine a manager has two options. They can make the decision themselves. If it works, the organisation moves on. If it fails, they may need to explain why they acted without consulting anyone.

Or they can escalate. Their leader considers the issue. Perhaps it takes longer. Perhaps the decision is exactly the same. But the risk has changed. It is now shared. Sometimes transferred entirely.

If organisations consistently punish incorrect decisions more heavily than unnecessary escalation, people learn remarkably quickly that escalation becomes a form of risk management.

Not necessarily risk management for the organisation. Risk management for the individual. That distinction matters. Because telling people to “take ownership” will not change much if the incentives continue pointing upwards.

RESPONSIBILITY IS NOT THE SAME AS AUTHORITY

Organisations are generally quite good at allocating responsibility. Job descriptions are full of it. Decision authority is often considerably less explicit.

What can this person actually decide? Without approval. Without consultation. Without putting a paper to the executive. Without asking finance, HR, legal and three other stakeholders who may each believe they possess an informal veto.

This creates an unusual organisational arrangement.

People can become responsible for outcomes they are not entirely authorised to influence. Senior leaders then become frustrated when those people seek approval. The manager is told: “Use your judgement.” What they may hear is: “Make the decision yourself, but correctly.”

Those are not the same instruction.

Delegating decisions means delegating the possibility of difference

This is where delegation becomes uncomfortable.

Most senior leaders are reasonably happy for managers to make decisions they agree with. The real test occurs when the manager makes a defensible decision the senior leader would not have made. Not reckless, or unethical. Not outside agreed parameters. Just different.

The senior leader now has a choice. They can allow the decision to stand, or they can intervene. Sometimes intervention is necessary. But if leaders repeatedly overturn decisions because they prefer another reasonable option, managers learn something important.

They have authority until their judgement differs from the judgement above them. Next time, they escalate first.

This produces one of the more difficult contradictions of delegated leadership: Senior leaders cannot genuinely ask others to exercise judgement while requiring that judgement to replicate their own.

If the answer must always be the answer, you would have reached, the organisation has not delegated judgement. It has delegated the task of guessing upwards.

OWNERSHIP INCLUDES THE RIGHT TO BE IMPERFECT

There is an uncomfortable price attached to decentralised decision-making. Some decisions will be worse. Not catastrophically worse. Not negligently worse. Just worse than the decision a more experienced person might have made.

This is often where organisations retreat.

• They want greater ownership but not greater variance.
• Faster decisions but no increase in mistakes.
• More initiative but no unnecessary risk.
• People to learn through experience without experiencing anything that might teach them.

Those ambitions are understandable. They are not entirely compatible.

Judgement develops partly through making decisions where the answer is not obvious and then living with the consequences. Remove that experience and managers may become excellent coordinators. They do not necessarily become better decision-makers.

SENIOR LEADERS CAN BECOME VICTIMS OF THEIR OWN HELPFULNESS

Not every escalation is forced upwards. Some are invited.

• A manager approaches with a difficult issue.
• The senior leader immediately provides the answer.
• It takes five minutes.
• Everyone leaves satisfied.
• The problem is solved.

This feels like effective leadership.

Repeated often enough, however, the senior leader becomes part of the decision-making process for an extraordinary number of issues.

The manager learns that difficult decisions can be resolved quickly by going upstairs and the senior leader learns that nobody seems capable of deciding anything.

Both observations appear true. Neither notices they are reinforcing the other.

The irony is that competent senior leaders may be particularly vulnerable to this. They can make the decision quickly, often because they have seen the problem before. Their intervention therefore genuinely improves the immediate outcome.

But solving a manager's problem and developing a manager's judgement are not necessarily the same activity. Sometimes the more useful response to an escalation is another question: “What do you think we should do?”

And then, importantly, allowing them to do it. Not everything should be pushed down

There is an equally simplistic response available here: Decentralise everything.

That is not particularly intelligent either. Some decisions should move upwards.

• Decisions with enterprise-wide consequences.
• Significant financial exposure.
• Legal or regulatory implications.
• Issues that cross agreed risk thresholds.
• Choices requiring trade-offs between functions.
• Decisions where the person making them does not have access to information held at a higher level.

Escalation itself is not a failure. Unnecessary escalation is.

The challenge is ensuring people can tell the difference. “Use your judgement” is rarely enough. Good decision rights establish boundaries.

• What can be decided locally?
• What requires consultation?
• What must be escalated?
• At what threshold?

And when something is escalated, what exactly is being requested?

• Information?
• Advice?
• Approval?
• A decision?

Those distinctions prevent escalation from becoming the default response to uncertainty.

ACCOUNTABILITY BECOMES STRANGE WHEN DECISIONS TRAVEL UPWARDS

There is another consequence when everything is escalated. Ownership becomes difficult to locate.

• A manager identifies the problem.
• Their leader recommends an option.
• An executive approves it.
• The manager implements it.
• Six months later, the outcome is poor.

The question is, who owns the decision?

The manager can reasonably say it was approved above them. The executive can reasonably say the manager recommended it. Everyone participated. Nobody entirely decided.

This is how organisations can have elaborate accountability structures while accountability itself remains surprisingly difficult to find.

True ownership requires some connection between the authority to choose and the responsibility for what follows. Separate those too far and accountability becomes largely ceremonial.

THE QUESTION SENIOR LEADERS SHOULD ASK

When decisions repeatedly arrive at senior levels, it is tempting to look downwards but one must also look upwards.

• What happens when somebody makes the wrong call?
• What happens when they make a reasonable call we disagree with?
• Do our governance processes clarify decision rights or merely add more approvers?
• Have we delegated authority, or just responsibility?
• Do we coach people through difficult decisions, or quietly take those decisions back?

And perhaps most importantly: Is escalation irrational in this organisation?

Because if escalating is safer, easier and more defensible than deciding, people will escalate. Not because they lack ownership but because they understand the system.

An organisation cannot ask people to exercise judgement while systematically removing the risk that makes judgement necessary. Eventually, somebody has to own the decision. If every difficult decision travels upwards, that somebody will always be the person at the top. And everyone below them will learn to wait.