EP 111: Why Everything Escalates to You — And What That Reveals About Your Leadership System
Leaders don’t burn out because they’re weak. They burn out because everything defaults to them.
You open your laptop and it’s immediate: Slack pings, Teams messages, a pile of email, last-minute asks, HR questions, performance issues, compensation decisions, and someone’s “quick question” that is never actually quick.
This is the moment a lot of leaders quietly accept as normal.
But if every question feels like a crisis, your leadership system isn’t broken.
It’s missing.
The hidden cost most leaders never calculate
There’s a popular data point that it takes around 23 minutes to refocus after a single interruption. Even if the number varies by person and context, the leadership reality doesn’t: constant context switching destroys depth. Multiply that by dozens of interruptions, and you lose the only hours that matter—the ones where you can think, decide, and design.
This loss rarely shows up in a spreadsheet.
It shows up as:
Strategy that never gets protected
Decisions that get delayed or made tired
Leaders who become the “most expensive admin assistant” in the organization
A company that can’t scale because it can’t operate without you
You are not “working hard.” You’re trapped in the urgent.
That isn’t diligence. It’s a design flaw.
What your team learns when everything escalates to you
Escalation is never just workload. It’s culture.
When every issue lands on your plate, people learn:
“We can’t trust each other to handle this.”
“The process isn’t real.”
“If we push it upward, it gets solved.”
And if you consistently bail everyone out, you become the system.
That’s not resilience. That’s a house of cards.
This is where trust erodes quietly—because autonomy isn’t truly available if everything must be approved, re-checked, or solved at the top.
Authority gets misused in two directions
There are two common leadership failures that show up inside constant escalation:
Indecision: You have authority, but you don’t use it. Everything stalls.
Micromanagement: You use authority to make decisions that should belong to others.
Either way, authority is miscuing the organization.
The outcome is predictable: people stop thinking, stop owning, and stop building. And you become the bottleneck you never intended to be.
Strategy isn’t an indulgence. It’s governance.
Most leaders agree that strategic thinking is critical.
Most leaders also say they don’t have time for it.
That isn’t a calendar problem. It’s leadership hygiene.
World-class leaders don’t “find time” for strategy. They protect it—because it won’t happen by accident. If you don’t deliberately create undisturbed strategic space, the urgent will always win.
And if the urgent always wins, you’ve designed a business that can only run at the pace of your interruptions.
Escalation is the symptom. Upstream clarity is the cause.
If escalation is the default, something upstream is missing:
Clear roles
Clear ownership
Clear decision rights
Clear escalation criteria
Adequate knowledge transfer
A system people can trust without you supervising it
This is why job descriptions matter even in small companies—not as paperwork, but as infrastructure. When roles are fuzzy, everything becomes “someone’s job,” which usually means your job.
The shift: from execution to stewardship
Here’s the move you’re being asked to make at this stage of business growth:
Stop being the primary executor of everything important.
Start being the steward of the system that makes execution possible without you.
That’s the difference between a firefighter and a builder.
Three leadership moves you can make this week
Not a checklist. A reset.
1) Define one boundary that protects your thinking.
Put it on your calendar like governance, not preference. This can look like:
A weekly undisturbed strategic block
Two short admin blocks daily so your inbox doesn’t dictate your day
“No escalation during X hours unless it meets Y criteria”
2) Audit one recent escalation pattern.
Pick the last interruption that forced you into immediate action and ask:
What system should have prevented this?
What clarity was missing?
What decision right was unclear?
What “first step” should exist before it reaches me?
3) Clarify one expectation so your team knows what happens first.
When someone asks you something, pause before answering.
Ask yourself: What knowledge are they missing that I’m holding?
Then transfer it—document it, record it, or build the process once so you stop paying for it forever.
A question most leaders avoid
If nothing escalated to you tomorrow, what would you create with the time you saved?
Or—equally important—what would you finally stop sacrificing?
Your health. Your relationships. Your depth. Your ability to think. Your ability to lead.
Escalation has a cost to you, to your organization, and to your people.
And if you’re ready to move from chaos to stewardship, the work isn’t more hustle.
It’s structure.
It’s clarity.
It’s protection of the space where real leadership happens.
Want to listen to the full episode? You can catch it here.
