Stop being the default decision-maker

Last week, we dove deep on Decision Filters -- the guardrails that help your team internalize your tradeoff calculations and make decisions the way you do (without asking first).

This week, we’re expanding on the natural next layer: Escalation Triggers.

Even with strong filters in place, your team still needs to know exactly when a call is no longer in their lane.

Without that clarity, fear and decision paralysis creep in, putting everything back on your plate.

The Signal: Your clue that there’s work to do

Your team is using the Decision Filters you've defined and they're thinking through the tradeoffs…

but you’re still being pulled into decisions you shouldn’t touch.

It happens at least once a week:

A decision stalls at the last 10%.
Someone books time with you “just to confirm.”
A simple client request gets treated like a life or death situation.
A Slack thread spirals because no one is willing to make the final call.

The team is afraid of crossing a line they can’t see.

The Root Cause

You haven’t defined the boundaries of authority clearly enough… yet.

Even with the Decision Filters in place, it’s not totally clear

where the threshold is between “I’ve got this” and “you need to see this.”

In the absence of clear escalation rules, the default becomes:

escalate everything or escalate nothing.

One is better than the other, but both will break the business.

The Tool: Escalation Triggers

Escalation Triggers are explicit, objective, observable thresholds

that tell your team when a decision must involve leadership.

The list of triggers should be short so it’s super clear where you still want to make the final calls.

First, identify the areas where you want to establish clear boundaries for your team.

This isn’t about limiting them — it’s about liberating them from

speculation or fear about where the line is and

whether they’ve already crossed it.

Key areas to consider:

Financial Impact: Decisions that materially alter margin, cost structure or revenue.
Legal/Compliance Risk: Anything that could violate laws, safety standards or regulations.
Strategic Direction: Shifts in product, partnerships or long-term commitments.
High-Stakes Customer Impact: Risks to key clients or reputation.
Irreversible Consequences: Hard-to-undo moves that carry significant operational or financial cost.

Next, attach a quantifiable threshold to each trigger so your team knows where the line is.

The Fix: Implementing Escalation Triggers

Step 1 — Identify your categories of risk

Use the five domains above to frame your thinking and ask yourself:

Where does a bad decision hurt us the most?

Narrow down to the top 3-5 highest risk areas to start.

Step 2 — Set thresholds at the outer edge of your comfort

A threshold is a clear, measurable line that signals a decision has crossed out of

“team-owned” territory and now requires leadership involvement.

If you set the threshold level within your comfort zone, you won’t

successfully remove yourself from enough decisions or

build confidence and competency among your team.

For each area of risk, define the threshold at which

the business becomes uncomfortably exposed.

If it makes you a little nervous to delegate at that level of risk, it’s probably the right threshold.

Step 3 — Write each trigger in one simple sentence

No paragraphs, no caveats, no nuance.

These should be short, simple and binary: it’s either in their lane or it's in yours.

Examples:

“Any margin impact beyond 10%.”
“Any change with rework costs over $10,000.”
“Any delay beyond 72 hours on a key client project.”
“Any decision that could compromise safety or compliance.”

Step 4 — Teach your team how to escalate

This is where execution breaks down in scale-stage companies:

the team knows a threshold has been reached but has

no established escalation path to follow.

So give your team a framework:

When escalating, coach them to present:

The decision at hand
The trigger that was hit
The diligence they’ve already done
Their recommendation on how to proceed

That fourth piece is key.

It prevents lazy escalation (“I wasn’t sure, so I came to you”) and

builds the muscle of tradeoff management and decision-making under stress.

Step 5 — Embed triggers into your operating rhythm

Embedding triggers into your daily workflow turns them from a one-time announcement into a living system.

Your team sees the trigger in context at the exact moment they’re deciding,

which reduces hesitation, speeds up execution and keeps you out of the decision seat.

Weekly meetings: Add a simple prompt: “Any decisions hit a trigger this week?” This reinforces the habit and surfaces patterns early.
Project plans: Place relevant triggers next to key decision points so the team can make the right call in real time.
SOPs: Add trigger thresholds to the “Owner” section of SOPs to eliminate guesswork about who decides what.
Onboarding: Teach triggers on Day 1 so new hires understand decision boundaries before habits form.
Slack pins: Pin a one-line trigger list in relevant channels for high-visibility.

Step 6 — Review and adjust regularly

As the business grows, the escalation thresholds should evolve with it.

Reviewing regularly keeps them accurate and prevents outdated rules from slowing the team down.

Early stage: Design for more frequent escalation while judgment builds and risk tolerance is low.
Scale stage: Tighten to a smaller set of clear, measurable triggers that keep you out of day-to-day decisions.
Mature stage: Elevate thresholds so the decisions you're brought in on are mostly strategic (major bets, brand impact, big moves that would be costly to reverse).

Adjust the thresholds as the decisions that are being escalated

start to feel like they should be addressable at levels below yours.

Why It Works

When boundaries are explicit, guesswork disappears.

Your team stops defaulting to “just checking” and starts owning the decisions that are actually theirs.

This matters at scale because cognitive load is finite.

Every unnecessary decision you field is attention you can’t spend in other areas.

Triggers create a clean separation between

the decisions the team should drive and

the ones that deserve your attention.

They also reduce fear-based hesitation for your team. Instead of worrying about overstepping, your team has a concrete, shared understanding of when to escalate and why. That psychological safety increases speed without sacrificing standards.

Your Turn

Reply to this email and let me know: where would your team benefit from clear escalation triggers?

And if you’re ready to build a company-wide decision framework, but you’re not sure where to start, Book a Signal Session.

In one focused session, we’ll map out the decisions your team should own, define the Escalation Triggers that protect the business and build a clear path to pull you out of day-to-day decision traffic so you can get back to leading at the level your business now requires.