How Collaborative Escalations Increase Autonomy, Trust, and Speed
Early in my seven year tenure at Airbnb, I was interviewing a candidate for a Director of Product role. I asked a question regarding how they would handle a disagreement with a cross-functional peer regarding the direction to take on a product. The candidate answered succinctly, “I would escalate to our VP.” In the organization I was in at the time, we were strongly encouraged to make decisions without escalating, so I was immediately put off by this answer. I remember thinking to myself: if I escalated that to my VP they’d (nicely) ask me to get out of their (metaphorical) office and figure it out with my peer. I was correct that the answer the candidate gave was severely lacking, but what I’d later find was not for the reasons I initially thought.
Back then, just hearing the word “escalation” left a bad taste in my mouth. I associated escalations with reduced decision making autonomy since they relied on someone higher up making the decision, a decrease in trust by going behind someone’s back, and slowing down the decision making process by having to include another person.
A year later, I was introduced to a key distinction about escalations: divergent escalations and collaborative escalations.
Divergent Escalations
A divergent escalation is one where, after a disagreement between two peers, one or both of the people involved go to their manager without their peer’s knowledge. The person escalating usually does this with the intention to influence their manager to step in to support their view, often without giving their manager the full picture of the problem and the downsides of the approach they are advocating for. A divergent escalation rapidly diminishes trust between peers and makes the relationship between them more adversarial. A divergent escalation was the only kind of escalation I knew at the time. When escalations are discouraged and there is no framework for them, they will only be done out of desperation, tend to be divergent, and take longer to occur.
Collaborative Escalations
The new kind of escalation for me was the collaborative escalation. A collaborative escalation is when both people involved co-create the framing of the problem (including all the considerations involved with the decision) and then collaboratively try to come to a decision. If they can’t come to a decision, they figure out exactly where the disagreement is and how someone higher up in the organization would have a better high level picture or more authority to make this decision. From here, the people involved take the problem framing they co-created to their manager(s) for help.
Hearing about this distinction was eye opening for me, but it didn’t hit home until I put it into practice.
Collaborative Escalations in Practice
A few months later, a manager on my team let me know that they and another manager were not able to align on the path forward for a large technical project. The managers felt like this disagreement was a pretty big one and they wanted my help to make a decision. It was clear this disagreement was causing stress and frustration for them both. I asked the manager to work with the other manager to put together a 1-2 page document starting with the overall goals of the project, including key considerations and decision making principles involved, and finally the advantages and disadvantages of each of the approaches—all of this with the assumption that I had little knowledge of the details (which, in truth, I didn’t).
The managers came back to me with a document illustrating what I had asked for. It turned out that both managers were roughly aligned on 90% of the overall project plan and there was one implementation detail that they couldn’t agree on. What seemed like a massive disagreement at first, turned out to be a disagreement of just 10%. We had a meeting to decide on a final plan. The mood of the meeting was much less tense than I had expected. During the meeting, I weighed in that I thought one approach was better than the other due to experience I’d had with a related area and some knowledge of potential pivots our organization may have to take. We wrapped up the meeting early leaving both managers feeling comfortable with the decision and good about their relationship with each other. I was amazed and relieved that we were able to go from a tense situation and a seemingly large disagreement to a calm alignment on a path forward.
A month later, the same manager brought me another disagreement, this time with a different peer. I reminded the manager about the collaborative escalation process we had gone through before. I didn’t hear anything back for a couple weeks so I followed up with the manager to see what happened with that decision. The manager said that once they co-created a document starting with goals and working down through implementation, the answer became clear to them both and they just went ahead and moved forward without needing me. I was even more amazed this time as I saw that collaborative escalations could work without even escalating at all.
Autonomy, Trust, and Speed
Through introducing a collaborative escalation process with my team, I experienced this type of escalation’s immense power. I saw that escalations, when done in a collaborative way, actually increase autonomy, trust, and speed. Collaborative escalations increase autonomy by providing a forcing function for peers to work together on the framing of the problem, which often reduces the scope of the escalation or eliminates the need to escalate at all. Collaborative escalations increase trust by getting peers to collaborate and set clear expectations with each other in situations where previously they would have ended up in an adversarial divergent escalation. And finally, collaborative escalations increase decision making speed because they take what would have been days or weeks of deliberation about whether to take the trust-reducing step of a divergent escalation and turn it into a clear, open, and relatively painless process.
Insight and Action
I coach leaders to help them gain insight and take action. Answering the questions below will help you generate insights and actions that are specific to you about escalations and increasing autonomy, trust, and speed in your teams.
What’s one key insight you got from this article?
How do escalations work on your team or at your company today? Would all your direct reports answer this question the same way?
What would having a clearer process for escalations do for you and your team?
Do you cringe when you read or hear the word “process”? What about processes that speed things up instead of slow them down?
How will you incorporate a concept about collaborative escalations into your team within the next week?
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