Practical, weekly articles on turning managers into leaders who run the business. Written by Jimmy Burroughes from real engagements with 3,000+ managers.
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Your management scorecard is probably showing you satisfaction scores, completion rates, and self-rated confidence going up. Meanwhile the first ninety minutes of your day are gone before you've got your coat off.
There is a moment that happens in almost every operational business, usually without anyone noticing it happen. A high-stakes deal is on the table. A critical client relationship wobbles. A project that matters is heading sideways. And the most senior person in the room, the GM, the Head of Ops, the Sales Director, rolls up their sleeves and takes it over personally.
Everything lands on your desk. Decisions that should have been made two levels below. Escalations from managers who are capable but keep checking upward before acting.
Your managers are working flat out. Long hours, full meetings, constant emails. And yet the numbers are not where they should be, strategic priorities set at the start of the quarter are sitting untouched, and escalations keep landing on desks they should never reach.
Your management layer had a strong quarter. Reviews were happening. Decisions were moving. Escalations were down. Then slowly, without anyone deciding it, the operating rhythms drifted. A weekly review got skipped. A decision framework got ignored because escalating was faster. An accountability conversation did not happen because nobody wanted the conflict.
I once used an analogy with a client that I have never been able to improve on, so I keep using it. Leadership programmes are like painting the outside of your house with water-based paint. It looks fantastic the day you finish. The colours are clean, the coverage is even, everyone compliments the result. Then it rains, and six weeks later you are standing in your garden looking at exactly the same weathered surface you started with.
Your exec team sets direction. But direction without execution is a slide deck. The management layer is where strategy either becomes daily action or quietly dies - and if that layer is clogged with friction, nothing above or below it works properly. If your senior leaders are still firefighting, if escalations keep climbing, if the strategy looks right on paper but is not showing up in operations - the management layer is almost certainly where it is breaking down.
Performance is short. The leadership team cannot pinpoint why. So the org chart gets redesigned. It feels decisive. It is announceable. And six months later the same problems are back with different reporting lines. A restructure changes where people sit. It does not change how decisions, escalations, and friction move through the management layer. And in an operational business, it is the flow that determines performance - not the structure.
Every time you solve a problem your manager should have solved, you are not helping them. You are training them to bring you the next one. That is the escalation tax. Most organisations are paying it every day without calculating what it actually costs. The visible cost is obvious: twenty minutes here, half an hour there. The invisible cost is the bigger problem - and it is compounding against you every week.
When performance is short, the instinct is to reach for headcount or a restructure. Both are expensive, both take months, and both assume you do not have enough people or they are in the wrong places.
"I just need my managers to step up." Nearly every senior leader says some version of this. It sounds reasonable. It is almost always the wrong diagnosis.
The managers about to leave are not the ones complaining. They are the ones who have gone quiet. By the time you are trying to retain them, the decision is already made. The only thing left to negotiate is timing.
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