In our previous posts on Management by Exception (MBE), we covered the core philosophy of empowering teams while maintaining strategic oversight, as well as best practices for effectively handling escalations when they do occur. But there’s a crucial third element that makes this leadership approach truly sustainable: developing your team’s escalation instincts.
Even with clear criteria, open communication channels, and your skilled handling of exceptions, MBE can start to break down if team members aren’t skilled at recognising situations that genuinely warrant escalation in the first place. Miss too many of those cues and you end up dropping crucial balls; escalate too many minor issues and you’ve defeated the purpose of autonomy.
Mastering MBE long-term requires building what former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower called “the blank mind.” The ability to instantly sort daily events and issues into two categories: the ordinary to be handled through routine processes, and the truly exceptional situations requiring your involvement. Just as elite athletes and first responders develop razor-sharp split-second decision instincts through experience and training, so too must your team hone its escalation instincts.
The good news is, this recognition ability can absolutely be cultivated through intentional practices. Here’s a playbook of techniques to build those instincts:
Share “Trigger” Lists
While your escalation criteria provide guardrails, it helps to go deeper with specific, contextual trigger examples tailored to your team’s domain. Collaboratively brainstorm detailed, concrete scenarios that should set off mental alarm bells as escalation-worthy exceptions.
These can span areas like budgeting (“Any marketing expense over £25k, or any expense coded to the wrong department”), quality (“A bug that leads to account security breaches”), stakeholder relations (“An upset from one of our top 3 clients”), organisational impact (“A project that affects hiring across multiple teams”), workplace policy (“Issues related to harassment or discrimination”), and so on.
Turn these trigger lists into easy-access documentation or checklist-style resources that everyone can quickly reference, sharpening their exception radar. Review and update them quarterly as new situations arise.
Download a “Second Brain”
Certain complex or niche areas require deep reserves of specialised knowledge to truly recognise the exceptions. Your team may simply lack the context and experience in these “blind spot” domains to know when something is veering into uncharted waters.
But you or others in your organisation likely possess that accumulated wisdom. Facilitate downloading those seasoned “second brains” into your team through:
- Targeted training sessions where experts share crucial context and examples
- Shoutouts on your company’s knowledge sharing channels or forums
- Curated reading material from industry publications and expert sources
- Shadowing opportunities where team members can observe firsthand
- Help them recognise crucial subtleties, patterns, and implications that might easily get overlooked. Use anecdotes, case studies, and interactive exercises to make the lessons stick.
Celebrate “Near Misses”
Escalation instincts aren’t just about escalating the right things; it’s also about resisting the urge to escalate issues that your team does have the capability and authority to handle themselves. Both are important skills to hone.
So when a team member navigates a tricky situation through sound judgment and problem-solving without unnecessarily escalating it to you, make sure to commend them. Celebrate these “near misses” and have them share their thought process: How did they assess the situation wasn’t an escalation-worthy exception? What hints or contextual cues helped them make that wise determination?
Not only does this reinforce good escalation instincts, it also cross-pollinates valuable example scenarios for others to learn from.
Apply Technology as a Force Multiplier
Developing escalation instincts will always be a “human-in-the-loop” capability, but new technologies can enhance that human judgment through augmented intelligence. Explore solutions that:
- Use natural language processing to automatically flag communications that hit defined linguistic risk triggers meriting escalation
- Apply machine learning against your historical issue data to classify new situations into escalation/non-escalation categories with increasing accuracy
- Employ intelligent workflow and case routing to bubble up exceptions to the right responders based on context
- Employ data visualisation and advanced monitoring that highlights true anomalies against normal patterns
Treat these as supplemental tools to augment, not replace, the escalation instincts you’re embedding into your team. Their intelligence accelerates issue identification and triage but your staff remains the crucial final decision authority on actual escalation.
Build a Legacy of Veteran Instincts
As you progress through these practices, closely study which team members demonstrate the sharpest escalation instincts. They aren’t just operationally excellent, they have a keen contextual sense for separating routine issues from substantive exceptions. Leverage this instinct “muscle memory” by:
- Having them mentor more junior teammates
- Inviting them to help train and onboard new staff
- Tasking them with writing or recording their own detailed case studies to share
- Involving them in tweaking your escalation policies and trigger lists
- Grooming them as escalation point-person resources their peers can tap
These veterans become your “instinct whisperers” who can pass down this crucial gut wisdom to future generations of the team. Don’t let their hard-earned knowledge walk out the door.
Master MBE for the Long Haul
Management by Exception only succeeds when both sides uphold their respective responsibilities.
As a leader, you must build a system of trust, establish clear criteria, respond skillfully to escalations, and model the appropriate behaviours. But equally critical is developing a team instilled with the wisdom to actually recognise those exceptions in their daily flow of work.
Cultivate that instinct muscle through contextual examples, expert knowledge transfers, learning celebrations, gamification, and amplifying technologies. Turn escalation recognition from an arbitrary guessing game into an ingrained “sixth sense” reflex.
With your steady hand and their sharpened instincts working in concert, you’ll strike a sustainable equilibrium: empowered autonomy on the routine; your guidance on the exceptions that matter most. Master that equilibrium and you master the art of Management by Exception.
