I’ve learned I have a different understanding of the escalation process by the looks on people’s faces. People seem to have an amount of fear or dread at the process, which I think is misplaced.

In my work, the role of escalations is to establish the priority for our business. As an example, I believe that your team should work on upgrading to Python 3.14. You don’t think that’s a priority. There is no objective truth to the “is this a priority?” question, only truths for our business.

If we can’t work out the priority between us that we’re both happy with, we have a minor disagreement. The way we solve this disagreement is to go to the person with the most shared context about our priorities. In my experience, this is the lowest shared manager in our org chart.

On their decision, we should “disagree and commit” while correcting our own internal understanding of what the company values and prioritizes.

This isn’t a “telling on someone” thing because someone didn’t get their way. It isn’t adversarial. Instead, I think it’s really about people trying to figure out what the business values and acting accordingly. With this as a frame, escalation provides welcome clarity rather than dread.