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"It constipates decision-making. Everything has to go up the chain; everything is an escalation; no one can make a decision."A senior leader said this to me during my research into what helps and hinders strategy execution in large firms. I laughed. Then I wrote down every word, because I have never heard escalation culture described better. (The digestive imagery came free of charge.)The leader kept going: "That means forward momentum is concentrated in the hand of that authority."If you have waited three weeks for sign-off on something the whole room agreed on in five minutes, you know exactly what they meant.<h3>What is escalation culture?</h3>Escalation culture is a pattern where decisions routinely travel up the hierarchy for approval, even when people closer to the work hold the information and the capability to make the call. Decisions queue at a handful of senior leaders, delivery slows to the pace of their diaries, and people further down stop deciding because the system has taught them their calls won't stand. Some structure helps. People decide faster when they know where the line sits and which calls belong at the top. The trouble starts when "send it up" becomes the default for everything.<h3>Signs your business has an escalation problem</h3><ul><li>Your executive meeting agenda is mostly approvals.</li><li>Decisions get made, then remade one level up.</li><li>"Let me check with…" is the most common sentence in your building.</li><li>Projects sit at amber with "awaiting decision" in the comments for two reporting cycles running.</li><li>Your senior leaders clear their inbox at 10pm and the queue still grows.</li><li>Nobody will say a decision is stuck when the person holding it outranks them. Two or more of these, and your strategy is waiting in line.</li></ul><h3>What slow decisions cost you</h3>McKinsey surveyed more than 1,200 managers in its 2019 study Decision making in the age of urgency. Only 20% said their organisation excels at decision making. On average, 61% said most of the time they spend on decisions is used ineffectively.The split by level tells the escalation story. 68% of middle managers said their decision time was spent poorly, against 57% of C-suite executives. Middle managers carry the delivery and hold the least authority to move it. They feel the queue first.McKinsey put a number on the waste for a typical Fortune 500 company: more than 530,000 days of manager time a year, or roughly US$250 million in wages. Your organisation is smaller. Your queue is still costing you.<h3>Why escalation culture takes hold</h3>Rarely because of one controlling boss. Usually because the system rewards sending things up.Nobody wrote down who decides. When decision rights are unclear, upward is the safest direction. Nobody ever lost their job for asking permission.Governance built for big risks gets applied to small ones. A $5,000 call travels the same path as a $5 million one, through the same committee, on the same monthly cycle.Being wrong costs more than being slow. If a bad call gets you hauled into a meeting and a late call gets nobody in trouble, escalating is the rational choice.Leaders say "you own this" and then overturn the call. One reversal teaches a team more than ten speeches about empowerment.The surrounding culture expects the boss to decide. Some workplaces, and some national cultures, carry a stronger expectation that the most senior person makes the call. Know which way yours leans before you redesign anything.<h3>The planning step most leadership teams skip</h3>We plan targets, projects and budgets in fine detail. The decisions that move all of them get left to sort themselves out.When I build an integrated business plan with a leadership team, one of the first things we do is map the critical decisions. For each one, we answer four questions:<ol><li>What is the decision? Write it as a choice. "Approve go-live for the new billing system" beats "billing".</li><li>When does it land? A date or a trigger, tied to the plan.</li><li>Where does it sit? One role or one forum. A committee of eight is a waiting room.</li><li>Who has input, and who needs to know? Keep both lists short. Here is what a few rows look like:</li></ol><figure id="figure-u7zpearsvemv82gqr2" class=""><img id="u7zpearsvemv82gqr2" src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/393hUywGd5LusgZXHWmXQLLJRRfbtqLLCraGrDsnJnYlQWRhhScep0ZtNMvk84Gh.jpg" alt="" title="" class="object-cover bg-gray-100" style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="" data-positionx="undefined" data-positiony="undefined" data-fullwidth="false" data-mce-src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/393hUywGd5LusgZXHWmXQLLJRRfbtqLLCraGrDsnJnYlQWRhhScep0ZtNMvk84Gh.jpg" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;"></figure>Two questions to ask once you see the mapWhich of these could be pushed further down? Test each decision against two things. Does the person closer to the work hold the information needed? Is the downside recoverable if they get it wrong? Two yeses, and the decision moves down. Write the boundary next to it, such as a spend limit or an agreed scope, so the person knows where their call ends.Where will our governance slow the rest of them down? Line the decision dates up against your meeting calendar. A decision due in March that needs a board paper, with the board meeting in February and May, has a two-month delay built in. You have found the roadblock before you hit it.Answer both questions before delivery starts, and you design the delays out instead of discovering them in week nine.<h3>Make "this decision is stuck" safe to say</h3>Clarity about who decides solves half the problem. The other half is whether a team leader feels safe telling a GM, in front of peers, that the GM's decision is holding up the work.Three habits help:<ul><li>Add a standing "decisions waiting" item to the leadership meeting, with how many days each one has waited.</li><li>Name the decision, never the person.</li><li>Go first. Ask your team: "Which of my decisions are you waiting on?" Then act on the answer. The first time a leader does this in the room, the queue gets shorter. Visibly.</li></ul><h3>Where this fits in Strategy Execution by Design</h3>Decision rights sit within Governance and Accountability, Lever 4 of the Strategy Execution by Design model. The lever covers who owns what, how decisions get made and how progress gets held to account. Read the full lever or see all seven levers.<h3>Frequently asked questions</h3>What is escalation culture? Escalation culture is a pattern where decisions routinely go up the hierarchy for approval, even when people closer to the work have the information to make them. Decisions queue at senior leaders and delivery slows to match.What are decision rights? Decision rights define who makes a specific decision, who gives input, and who needs to be told. Clear decision rights stop decisions defaulting upward.How do you reduce escalation without losing control? Move a decision down only when the person closer to the work holds the information and the downside is recoverable. Set a written boundary, such as a spend limit, so control sits in the design instead of in every approval.What is a critical decision map? A critical decision map lists the decisions your strategy depends on, when each one lands, where it sits and who has input. Leadership teams build it alongside the integrated business plan.How often should you review your decision map? At every planning cycle, and whenever your structure or strategy changes. Quarterly suits most leadership teams.When did your leadership team last map where its critical decisions sit? If the honest answer is "never", you are in good company. Most teams haven't. The SEBD Snapshot assessment gives you a flavour of where your execution is slowing down, decisions included.<a data-mce-href="https://sebdsnapshot.rebeccareti.com/" href="https://sebdsnapshot.rebeccareti.com/">Take the Snapshot assessment →</a>Source: McKinsey &amp; Company (2019), Decision making in the age of urgency, McKinsey Global Survey. Quotes from senior leaders interviewed for Reti, R. (2022), Massey University.

Escalation culture: why every decision goes up the chain, and how to clear the queue

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Recently I sat with an executive team frustrated by their silos.They had done everything the playbook suggests. They restructured. They ran the collaboration workshops. They rewrote the values, and "one team" sat right at the top.The silos stayed exactly where they were.So I asked a different question. Show me how people here get rewarded.Every scorecard was individual. Every bonus, every performance rating, every promotion case. The strategy asked people to share resources and deliver together. The system paid them to do the opposite.Nobody in that business was being difficult. People were responding sensibly to what the organisation pays for.<h3>Why do silos persist after a restructure?</h3>Silos persist when the performance system rewards individual or team results while the strategy depends on collective effort. People protect their own budgets, people and priorities because their scorecard, bonus and promotion case depend on those results. Restructures and culture programs change the lines on the chart. The reward system decides what people do day-to-day. One senior leader in my research put it plainly: "You cannot give away all your resources if you are being rewarded with individual objectives. People are competing."The same pattern came up across leader after leader I interviewed. The strategy required collective effort. The processes and rewards incentivised the individual. Those silos were designed, by accident, by the performance system.<h3>What the mismatch creates</h3>When the strategy says "together" and the system pays for "mine", you get four predictable behaviours:<ul><li>Resources get protected. Lending your best analyst to another team for a quarter costs you a target. Nobody does it twice.</li><li>People compete. Colleagues in other functions become rivals for the same budget, headcount and ratings curve.</li><li>Trade-offs go local. Each leader makes the call best for their own numbers, and nobody owns the call best for the strategy.</li><li>Silos persist. Every workshop gets undone by the next performance review.</li></ul>The wider evidence backs this up. In their HBR study of nearly 8,000 managers in more than 250 companies, Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull found 84% of managers could rely on their boss and direct reports all or most of the time. Only 9% could rely on colleagues in other functions all of the time. Managers rated those internal commitments about as reliable as promises from external suppliers.<h3>Why collaboration workshops don't fix it</h3>Workshops build goodwill. Goodwill lasts until the first quarter where helping another team costs someone their bonus.People read the system, and they read the pay slip more closely than the values poster. If your rewards point one way and your strategy points another, people follow the rewards. Every time. Asking them to do otherwise asks them to take a personal hit for the organisation, again and again.The fix sits in the design of the performance system.<h3>Five things to redesign</h3>1. Shared goals. Make the collective outcomes explicit and put them in writing. If three functions need to deliver a new customer platform together, the platform belongs on all three scorecards, with the same measure.2. Collective measures. Measure team and cross-team impact, and give it real weight. A shared goal worth 5% of a scorecard tells people exactly how much you mean it.3. Cross-functional incentives. Reward how work gets done together. Ask, in every performance conversation and every promotion case: who did this person help succeed outside their own team?4. Governed trade-offs. Decide competing priorities at the right level, through a forum that owns the whole strategy. When two teams need the same resource, the call should go to the people accountable for the combined result, not settled by whoever argues hardest.5. Clear accountability. Define who is accountable for what, together. Shared goals without named owners turn into nobody's goals.<h3>Where to start on Monday</h3>Pull five scorecards from across your leadership team. Lay them side by side. Then ask three questions:<ul><li>How many objectives on these scorecards depend on another team to deliver?</li><li>How much of each bonus rests on a shared result?</li><li>If two of these leaders needed the same resource next quarter, whose scorecard would win, and who decides? </li></ul>If the answers make you wince, you have found your silos. They are sitting in your HR system.Where this fits in Strategy Execution by Design The link between rewards and strategy sits within Performance and Commitment, Lever 6 of the Strategy Execution by Design model. The lever covers whether people understand why the strategy matters, and whether the performance system rewards the work the strategy needs. Read the full lever or see all seven levers.<h3>Frequently asked questions</h3>Why do silos persist after a restructure? Silos persist when the performance system rewards individual or team results while the strategy depends on collective effort. A restructure changes reporting lines. Scorecards, bonuses and promotion criteria decide behaviour.Do individual incentives cause silos? Individual incentives create silos when the strategy needs people to share resources, solve problems across functions and deliver together. People protect what their scorecard measures.How do you break down silos? Redesign the performance system. Put shared goals on every relevant scorecard, give collective measures real weight, reward cross-functional contribution, govern trade-offs at the level accountable for the whole result, and name owners for shared outcomes.What is a collective performance measure? A collective performance measure tracks a result two or more teams deliver together, such as a customer outcome or a shared project milestone. Every contributing team carries the same measure on its scorecard.Can culture workshops fix silos? Workshops build goodwill and shared language. Without a change to rewards and measures, the performance system wins, and the silos return.If you want one team, design the system so acting like one is the sensible choice. Reward what you need repeated.Not sure whether your performance system is working with your strategy or against it? The SEBD Snapshot assessment gives you a flavour of where your execution is slowing down.<a data-mce-href="https://sebdsnapshot.rebeccareti.com/" href="https://sebdsnapshot.rebeccareti.com/">Take the Snapshot assessment →</a>Source: Sull, D., Homkes, R. and Sull, C. (2015), Why strategy execution unravels, and what to do about it, Harvard Business Review, March 2015. Quote from a senior leader interviewed for Reti, R. (2022), Massey University.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Why silos persist: your performance system is paying for them

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Strategy execution doesn’t fail because the capability doesn’t exist.It fails because of how leaders make decisions about it under pressure.The project budget gets stretched across more initiatives than it can carry.&nbsp;And when something has to give, the project isn't stopped, rather the execution capability around it is cut.Delivery orchestration gets pared back. Change enablement is transitioned to the business. Business ownership gets assigned on paper, then that person is pulled straight back into operations.Each decision looks reasonable at the project level.But across the portfolio, the damage adds up.The technical capability gaps get the airtime. The specialist gaps get the budget. But the capabilities that actually determine whether any of it lands?They're often treated as important but never critical.&nbsp;Until execution starts to drift.They’re the execution capabilities every strategic initiative needs, regardless of what it’s delivering.&nbsp;And most organisations have never planned for them at a portfolio level.My research backs this up. Over 70% of senior leaders rated execution capability as critical to achieving their outcomes.One said it plainly: “You can wish and you can dream, but if you do not have the capability to deliver on that ambition, you are just spinning your wheels.”In my experience, there are five execution capabilities that are non-negotiable: delivery orchestration, executive sponsorship, business ownership, change enablement, and domain expertise.These aren't just roles to fill, remember having someone named is not the same as having someone who can deliver it.So, the question becomes how you make sure the capability is genuinely there?Two of these, delivery orchestration and change enablement, can be sourced both internally and externally. There are more flexible options available now than ever before and if you are planning across the portfolio these decisions become far easier to address your resource model.But the other three, executive sponsorship, business ownership, and domain expertise, cannot be outsourced. They must be built and protected internally.If you're finding the same capabilities stretched or absent across your portfolio, that's not a resourcing problem.&nbsp;That's strategy approved without an execution plan that's actually feasible.Here's the question I'll leave you with: In your last portfolio review, did you assess whether each initiative had the execution capability to deliver? Or just whether it had the budget to start?This is part of lever 5 (Execution Feasibility) of the Strategy Execution by Design Model. <a data-mce-href="https://rebeccareti.com/execution-model" href="https://rebeccareti.com/execution-model">See the full framework →</a>Not sure which of the seven levers is holding your execution back? <a data-mce-href="https://sebdsnapshot.rebeccareti.com/" href="https://sebdsnapshot.rebeccareti.com/">Take the Strategy Execution Maturity Model Assessment →</a>Written by <a data-mce-href="https://rebeccareti.com/about" href="https://rebeccareti.com/about">Rebecca Reti</a>, strategy and execution consultant working with boards and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand.

The Five Execution Capabilities Every Initiative Needs

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Alignment says everyone should think and act the same way. Coherence says something narrower and harder: a small set of norms we cannot afford for variance on, while everything else is free to look completely different.Some consultants will sell you cultural alignment. For execution, what you actually need is coherence. They aren't the same thing.Finance runs on precision and control. Sales runs on speed and relationships. Operations runs on whatever keeps the lights on today. Aligning them would mean flattening what makes each of them good at their job. Nobody actually wants that, and it's not what execution needs anyway.What execution needs is narrower.&nbsp;A commitment made in one part of the business has to count in every part of it.Pace has to hold wherever one team's deadline depends on another.&nbsp;Risk has to travel to whoever needs to hear it, not stay wherever it's comfortable.&nbsp;That's the core, and it's small on purpose.Everything else, how fast a team decides internally, how it prefers to challenge itself - can stay exactly as different as it already is. What can't differ is whether two teams can disagree at a boundary and resolve it themselves, without escalating.&nbsp;That's not fragmentation. That's coherence doing its job properly.Get this wrong, and you won't see it in an engagement score. You'll see it in the handover that stalled, the commitment that quietly stopped counting the moment it crossed a boundary.Most culture work goes wide when it should go narrow. Naming the few norms you can't afford variance on, and leaving everything else alone, is more useful than a values statement everyone can agree with and nobody can act on. That's the work in <a data-mce-href="https://rebeccareti.com/services/leadership" href="https://rebeccareti.com/services/leadership" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">Leadership</a>.Where would your core fail first? This is part of lever 7 (Culture for Execution) of the Strategy Execution by Design Model. <a data-mce-href="https://rebeccareti.com/execution-model" href="https://rebeccareti.com/execution-model">See the full framework →</a>Not sure which of the seven levers is holding your execution back? <a data-mce-href="https://sebdsnapshot.rebeccareti.com/" href="https://sebdsnapshot.rebeccareti.com/">Take the Strategy Execution Maturity Model Assessment →</a>Written by <a data-mce-href="https://rebeccareti.com/about" href="https://rebeccareti.com/about">Rebecca Reti,</a> strategy and execution consultant working with boards and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand.The one-pager linked below helps you to see which things fall into which group, and gives you the test to run across your own business. <a data-mce-href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rebecca-reti-4582433b_strategyexecution-strategyexecutionbydesign-activity-7480023581830172672-rr7T" href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rebecca-reti-4582433b_strategyexecution-strategyexecutionbydesign-activity-7480023581830172672-rr7T">See it on LinkedIn →</a>

Alignment or coherence? They aren't the same thing

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You say collaboration. Yet you incentivise the lone wolf... and cross-functional delivery breaks.You say innovation. Yet you punish the failure... and people stop raising risks early.You say accountability. Yet you protect the senior leader who doesn't deliver... and commitment erodes at every level beneath them.You say customer-first. Yet you open every meeting with financials... and decisions start serving the numbers, not the customer.Every one of these is a reinforcement signal. Your people read every one of them. And they follow the signal, not the strategy.This is where execution quietly breaks down. The plan and the governance are rarely the problem. The cultural gap between what you design and what you do is.There are two types of reinforcement. Formal: reward, recognition, performance management, promotion. These are the ones you design.Informal: where leaders spend their time, how they respond to bad news, what gets discussed first on Monday morning, the stories that get retold, and what quietly gets tolerated.The informal signals were never designed. They formed through habit and history. And they are louder than any values statement.In my research, one respondent said it plainly: "Collectivism was encouraged but not rewarded. We could not move the strategy forward in silos."The strategy said one thing. The system said another. People followed the system. Execution stalled.You say collaboration. Yet you incentivise the lone wolf... and cross-functional delivery breaks.You say innovation. Yet you punish the failure... and people stop raising risks early.You say accountability. Yet you protect the senior leader who doesn't deliver... and commitment erodes at every level beneath them.You say customer-first. Yet you open every meeting with financials... and decisions start serving the numbers, not the customer.Every one of these is a reinforcement signal. Your people read every one of them. And they follow the signal, not the strategy.This is where execution quietly breaks down. The plan and the governance are rarely the problem. The cultural gap between what you design and what you do is.There are two types of reinforcement. Formal: reward, recognition, performance management, promotion. These are the ones you design.Informal: where leaders spend their time, how they respond to bad news, what gets discussed first on Monday morning, the stories that get retold, and what quietly gets tolerated.The informal signals were never designed. They formed through habit and history. And they are louder than any values statement.The formal signals are easy to audit. The informal ones are the ones people actually read, and they were never designed. Surfacing what your system is really rewarding, and changing it, is the work in <a data-mce-href="https://rebeccareti.com/services/leadership" href="https://rebeccareti.com/services/leadership" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">Leadership</a>.In my research, one respondent said it plainly: "Collectivism was encouraged but not rewarded. We could not move the strategy forward in silos."The strategy said one thing. The system said another. People followed the system. Execution stalled.This is part of lever 7 (Culture for Execution) of the Strategy Execution by Design Model. <a data-mce-href="https://rebeccareti.com/execution-model" href="https://rebeccareti.com/execution-model">See the full framework →</a>Not sure which of the seven levers is holding your execution back? <a data-mce-href="https://sebdsnapshot.rebeccareti.com/" href="https://sebdsnapshot.rebeccareti.com/">Take the Strategy Execution Maturity Model Assessment →</a>Written by <a data-mce-href="https://rebeccareti.com/about" href="https://rebeccareti.com/about">Rebecca Reti</a>, strategy and execution consultant working with boards and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand.The one-pager maps the cultural gap your organisation is living with right now. <a data-mce-href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rebecca-reti-4582433b_strategyexecution-executionbydesign-cultureforexecution-activity-7477466024804573184-mSJ9" href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rebecca-reti-4582433b_strategyexecution-executionbydesign-cultureforexecution-activity-7477466024804573184-mSJ9">See it on LinkedIn →</a>

Your people follow the signal, not the strategy

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You know the meeting. Everyone sits around the table. The proposal is presented. The leader asks if there are any concerns.Silence.The plan gets approved. Everyone leaves. And the real conversation starts in the corridor."That's never going to work." "Did anyone else think the timeline was unrealistic?" "I wasn't going to be the one to say it."In Anglo cultures, this pattern is particularly evident. Societal culture plays a bigger role in execution than most organisations realise. This pattern around confrontation runs through Australia, New Zealand and the UK societies, to varying degrees.Broadly, we value directness in theory, but default to politeness in practice. Challenge gets interpreted as confrontation. Disagreement gets confused with disrespect. And flawed plans get approved because nobody is willing to be the person who pushes back.My research highlighted that, 73% of senior leaders believed avoidance behaviours were having a high to extremely high impact on execution in their businesses. Not because people lacked opinions. Because the culture had taught them it was safer to stay quiet.Most organisations sit in one of two places. Either people feel safe but nothing gets challenged. Meetings end with false agreement. Plans sail through unchecked. Or people do challenge, but it depends on personality and power. The loudest voice wins. Others learn to stay silent.Neither delivers execution.The zone that does is where both safety and challenge are present. Not safety first, then challenge later. Both designed together. Where challenge is expected, not tolerated. Where it is built into how decisions are made, not left to individual courage.Challenge doesn't become normal because someone brave starts doing it. It becomes normal when it's designed into how decisions get made. That's the work in <a data-mce-href="https://rebeccareti.com/services/leadership" href="https://rebeccareti.com/services/leadership">Leadership</a>: building an executive team where disagreement is expected rather than survived.One organisation in my research built a simple mechanism: a shared phrase that gave people a way in. "I want to challenge you constructively." It sounds small. But it gave people language to cross the gap between silence and confrontation without it becoming personal.That is the difference between challenge as a culture and challenge as an act of bravery. When challenge depends on courage, it is a lottery. When it is designed into the system, it becomes the norm.This is part of lever 7 (Culture for Execution) of the Strategy Execution by Design Model. <a data-mce-href="https://rebeccareti.com/execution-model" href="https://rebeccareti.com/execution-model">See the full framework →</a>Not sure which of the seven levers is holding your execution back? <a data-mce-href="https://sebdsnapshot.rebeccareti.com/" href="https://sebdsnapshot.rebeccareti.com/">Take the Strategy Execution Maturity Model Assessment →</a>Written by <a data-mce-href="https://rebeccareti.com/about" href="https://rebeccareti.com/about">Rebecca Reti</a>, strategy and execution consultant working with boards and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand.There's a one-pager mapping what challenge looks like when it's left to chance versus designed for execution, with five practical mechanisms for building it in. <a data-mce-href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rebecca-reti-4582433b_strategyexecution-executionbydesign-cultureforexecution-share-7474621944051433472-NumY" href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rebecca-reti-4582433b_strategyexecution-executionbydesign-cultureforexecution-share-7474621944051433472-NumY">See it on LinkedIn →</a>

Why nobody challenges the plan until it's too late

Rebecca Reti Consulting

Rebecca Reti Consulting is a boutique strategy execution consultancy based in Brisbane, working with CEOs, boards, and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand. We help leaders build the conditions for effective execution through four service areas: Strategy and Planning, Execution and Delivery, Leadership and Culture, and Training Programs. Our proprietary Strategy Execution by Design (SEBD) framework bridges the gap between strategic intent and measurable outcomes.

Insights

Escalation culture: why every decision goes up the chain,...

Why silos persist: your performance system is paying for ...

The Five Execution Capabilities Every Initiative Needs

Alignment or coherence? They aren't the same thing

Your people follow the signal, not the strategy

Why nobody challenges the plan until it's too late