Dirty Escalations Making Frenemies and Pissing Off People - Chase Seibert

This resource first appeared in issue #70 on 16 Apr 2021 and has tags Strategy: Working across an organization

Dirty Escalations: Making Frenemies and Pissing Off People - Chase Seibert

So Manager-Tools would tell us, correctly, that escalation is a very broad term that means any kind of communication of increased urgency/importance - bringing a due-date of a deliverable earlier, going from an email to a phone call or a quick video chat, etc. That is all true, and “escalation” is also widely used to mean specifically raising an issue up the organizational ladder, and until we have a term specifically for that kind of activity, people will continue to use escalation to mostly mean that.

Seibert talks about the “to the manager” kind of escalation, what the problems are, and how it can go bad. The suggestion is to have the two team members jointly escalate to their manager(s) with a co-authored document which then maintains the context as it goes up the chain. Not only is that a pretty good approach, it even works when the team members share a manager and that manager’s you. You want to avoid being the tie breaker of first resort, and encouraging your team members to author something and send it to you is a good step towards having them get it mostly sorted themselves.