Drama kills orgs. Solutions feed them.
Most people think they’re good at escalating. They’re not. They just pass the baton and call it leadership.
Two kinds. External and internal.
External is easy. A customer asks for your manager because they want to feel heard. Usually they do, and it’s settled. Simple.
Internal is where careers quietly stall. And here’s the trap most people walk straight into.
They run the internal one like it’s external. They march into their manager’s office acting like the customer, demanding a referee, expecting the boss to step in and rule in their favor.
That’s not escalation. That’s ego.
It says you see yourself as the most important thing in the room, more important than the team, the call, the company. No empathy for the person you just dumped it on. Do it enough and it fails you miserably one day. I’ve watched it happen.
Because nobody above you can make a good call on a bare problem. They need a proposal sitting next to it. “Let’s solve this together” or “I need your help getting to a solution” beats “that’s the problem, you handle it” every single time.
I spent thousands of hours of my career writing plans that got rejected. Took me years to see that a rejected plan is already a win. You moved the thinking. Enforcing your idea was never the job. Proposing it was.
People get promoted on exactly that. Bringing solutions, pushing progress, even when half get reshaped or killed. That’s the engine.
It got brutally clear after I became a CEO, even of a small team. The ones who only handed me problems lost my trust fastest. I hated it. Every leader I know hates it. We don’t get paid to admire problems.
You don’t need the title to work this way. Think like a small CEO from wherever you sit. Manage up. Bring the solution with the problem. Every time.
Drama kills orgs. Solutions feed them.
The organizations that stop moving forward die. So do the careers inside them.
#leadership #CTO #CEO #management