Escalating Thoughts (Thoughts about Escalations)

~1000 words. 4 minute read.

It strikes fear in the hearts of Product, Tech, Marketing, Regulatory Compliance, Legal, Field Leadership, Change Management – all of them, no matter how you like to slice or dice your stakeholders: Escalation! Sent with the little red exclamation mark. A hundred people in CC:. Blame to go around.

But why blame, right?! Positive intent - hard enough to assume, but let’s say we are – would suggest that nobody made a mistake on purpose or willfully procrastinated your item ad infinitum.

I am reminded of the opening scene of the hit movie Wedding Crashers. Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are mediating a divorce. Such a quotable movie; here is the line I am talking about: Vaughn: “Guys, the real enemy here is the institution of marriage! It’s not realistic!!”

Maybe every escalation email, meeting, IM should start with: “Guys, the real enemy here is the high complexity of this thing we are trying to build and launch within a highly matrixed organization! It’s not realistic!!” Maybe that would cushion the blow of the red exclamation mark a little? Maybe it would create a common enemy – a common goal to stay positive – instead of a game of You’re-It?

Retro-Power (The Power of Retrospectives)

Arguably, by the time you escalate, it’s too late for peace. You’re already playing your last-resort-card. And you’re playing it in public; chances are you already played it a few times 1-on-1, with this leader and with that leader and since you cannot find the wall you have to break, you go nuclear. But how to swallow your feelings of anger, of frustration? After all, you really weren’t the one to mess up!!!

Powerful moment: Release night. It’s not working. Minutes turn into hours, the night gets darker, the sugar high from the pizza and soda is gone. Someone snaps and the good intentions, the common goal – it’s all gone. Yelling goes on: “THIS IS PROD! THIS IS THE RELEASE! WE HAVE TO CALL ALL THESE PEOPLE AT HOME AND TELL THEM THAT WE NEED THEM BECAUSE YOU, TEAM X, (here it comes), DID NOT GET YOUR STUFF APPROVED/REVIEWED/SORTED OUT ON TIME!” Silence all around.

One guy, one Superhero, calmly suggests this: “There will be plenty of time after tonight to do a retrospective of how we got here. Let’s focus on this deployment.”

How can anyone argue with that? Conflict not solved, but conflict re-scheduled! Emotion cooled. (Especially easy to pull off if you have a process with a powerful back-out or Plan-B-plan, good stakeholder relationships, and good to excellent communication skills, as well as an established retrospective culture).

Extreme Ownership

Navy Seal-style (yea, that book by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin)! If extreme ownership is already the dominant amino acid of your org’s DNA, the word ‘Escalation’ won’t scare you, because no-one plays the blame game.

Since most orgs (making an assumption here) are not galvanized by extreme ownership, it’s a great way for the individual to exemplify leadership by asking FIRST: “What could I, we, my team have done differently to prevent this situation? How can I, we, my team learn from it?”

Two great outcomes from this: 1. You are opening the door to receive feedback and criticism, but you’ll find that the response more often than not is that people ask themselves the same thing. 2. The second question pulls everyone from the present into the future, because the next release is probably right around the corner.

Culture

Escalation does not equal Escalation. (Reading suggestion: The Culture Map by Erin Meyer). Pay close attention to hierarchy rules in your country, your organization, your team, your stakeholders. From my own experience, I know that when working with Germans, putting someone’s boss in CC (whatever your intent) can count as an immediate, drastic escalation of your recipient’s performance. (Drastic, okay?!) Deviation from any org-chart-established communication path puts the escalator in a worse light than the escalatee. You become the common enemy. All hope for a good resolution destroyed; right off the bat.

Words Matter

Every time I hear someone say ‘Words matter’, I am losing it (on the inside, not on zoom). I get the saying, but it’s an immediate John Madden moment: stating the obvious. It’s meta-nonsense: By saying something as superfluous as ‘Words matter’, the speaker already violated this very maxim. Okay, soapbox moment over. What I really wanted to suggest is this: in case you read this and you are ‘escalating’ something or you are affected by an ‘escalation’, try some of these synonyms suggested by MS Word’s thesaurus and let me know if using a different word (because, you know, words matter!) results in different crisis handling:

Nouns: growth, boom, appreciation, increase, climb, acceleration, intensification, rise

Verbs: intensify, worsen, heighten, deteriorate, spiral, increase, rocket, accelerate, soar, shoot up