The short guide
Why everything gets escalated to you, and how to stop it
Escalations are a design problem, not a people problem
When a manager escalates, the easy story is that they lack confidence or capability, so the business buys training. In our work with nearly 3,500 managers, skill is only 10 to 20% of the reason people do not act. The bigger cause is friction: nobody said what they can decide, who owns the call, or what happens if they get it wrong.
Playbook 02, Skill, will, blind spot or friction, sorts which of the four causes you are dealing with before you spend a penny on training.
Find the decisions that route through you
Playbook 30, The Friction Map, is the free sample in this pack. You list the approvals and questions that reached you last week, mark which ones genuinely need you, and move one of the others this week. Most managers find more than half did not need them at all.
RACI: who decides? then gives every recurring decision one name, so it stops bouncing between managers.
Stop answering, start asking
Every time you answer a question, you teach your team to ask you again. Playbook 24, What do you suggest?, changes the conversation: no problem comes to you without a suggested answer. Four decision modes then lets you say out loud whether a call is yours, theirs or shared, so delegated decisions stop coming back.
Track one number: decisions escalated to you each week. Count it today, then at day 30, 60 and 90 on the scorecard at the back.
