Proactive Escalation

In this posting, I am going to write about what proactive escalation with few examples. Let us check out.

Let us assume that you are boarding a Bus in the morning to reach your office.  The Bus is little crowded and however, after few stops, luckily you get a seat.  I know how it feels like in Chennai public transport. A great relief.  After few minutes, you hear a ticking sound right under your seat. Out of curiosity, when you look down, you are shocked to see a bomb that's ticking to go off in the next few hours, let us say, 4 hour. 

If you were to be in this situation, pls. let me what would you do?

1)  4 hours means plenty of time and I don’t have to inform right away. I think I can inform later after reaching your office.

2) I would get down in the next 30 min so it's not my problem. Somebody else can notify it to the Bus conductor or the concerned authorities

3)  Just ignore the bomb and go ahead as if I’ve noticed nothing unusual

4)  Inform the Bus conductor / driver & concerned authorities immediately without wasting any time and get the passengers out of the Bus on war-footing.

The answer is obviously 4. 

Though there could be 4 hours, I don’t think we would wait till the last minute to put it off.  We would react immediately so there is enough to put off the ticking bomb.

Even in real work environment, there could be serious issues cropping up (similar to the ticking bomb) and any executive or Manager is first of all expected to assess / anticipate such issues which are like potential bombs much before it causes any damage. That's what I call it as proactive escalation.  There is no point in doing an escalation or alerting the Manager in the last minute wherein you or your Manager cannot do anything. This leads to a crisis situation and you need to do fire-fighting instead of acting proactively.  Doing anything after the issue has happened is only a post-mortem and it’s of no use.

Scenario-1: Let say that you are a rec executive and you need to onboard a 40 fresher in 4 weeks’ time (TAT).  So you need to select on an average 11 candidates every week considering drop-outs so you would have selected 44 candidates end of 4 weeks.  Four can be factored for probably drop-outs.  When you see that the candidates turnout less that what you would usually have and you could select only 10 end of the 2nd week, it's important to escalate it to your Manager immediately so it gives another 2 weeks’ time for you and your managers to plan and salvage the situation. If the issue is not assessed proactively, and escalation is done in the 4th week, it's not going to help.  It's like waiting for the bomb to tick till the last minute instead of informing it immediately.

Scenario-2:  Let us say you are a Supervisor responsible for product delivery (which could be IT or any ITes services etc.) that happens on a fortnightly basis. When you face unplanned high absenteeism for few days or drop out (attrition) of few important team members, it's likely to affect the quality and TAT or on time delivery. When you are in such a situation, it's critical to assess the likely impact immediately and escalate it proactively to your Manager. If it’s not done, it would leave you and your Manager with very less time to do anything and it will not help. 

Transferring Monkey to other’s / Boss’s shoulder: It's just not proactive escalation. We also need to recommend possible solutions or suggestions.  If we just escalate and sit back leaving it to the boss to figure out what needs to be done, it's like transferring the monkey from our shoulder to our Boss's shoulder and that's not an effective problem solving.

In the first scenario, the possible suggestions that we may give could be Participating in job fairs that are happening / releasing newspaper ads / planning the recruitment drives on weekends so we could attract more candidates and it also leaves us with more days within the TAT time / Off-campus drives etc.,  In the second scenario, the possible suggestions could be identifying similar talent or skills from the other teams within the Organization/ or talking to the customer for doing the delivery in 2 phases rather than delivering everything with quality issues etc.,  The point is, let us not transfer the monkey to other's shoulders and keep quite. That is not the right approach.

Remember, wherever and whenever you see a likely potential issue, it could be like a bomb ticking and you need to defuse it by proactive escalation.

Proactive escalation is one the important traits that every executive / Manager should necessarily have to be effective in their roles and to be successful in the career.

So let us be proactive. 

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