Response to Exec Escalations at Work

I am writing today on something that I learnt from a senior Product Leader at Microsoft (JJ Cadiz) a few years ago, when I used to work with the Outlook team. Today, I applied that learning today, and I remembered JJ and sent a note of gratitude to him.

This is focused towards Product folks in large organizations, but if you have a similar situation in other functions (engineering / design etc) and/or in smaller organizations, it might probably be useful as well. Use at your discretion.

Situation:

• There is some work that your team is working on.
• Perhaps it is getting delayed, or has some ambiguities that have not been resolved. Or perhaps dependencies have not been resolved.
• While you are working on it, some partner / dependent team has not been informed sufficiently of progress, and feel that it has to be escalated.
• They send an email adding their strong displeasure, and add their VP and CVP on the thread.
• Immediately after, both the VP and/or CVP add on top of that email, reiterating the importance of that project / feature, and asking if there is anything that he/she can help to speed it up.

Ok. Now lets look at some observations on this scenario:

• Given the CVP/VP response, it was most likely the fact that they were informed by the escalator of the escalation in advance, and was asked to drop a ++ note on top.
• Escalators don't use this too often. If you did not know already, this should give you an immediate kick-in-the-rear about the criticality of the project. Sometimes it just does not come out in specs / comms.
• Perhaps a regular cadence of comms was not already set with this partner team. Some teams feel that as a perquisite. Not all teams though. It is best for a PM to check on this early.
• Should I react immediately? Yes, you absolutely should. It is an exec escalation. It would be seen as irresponsible if you do not respond.
• If you are the senior PM leader accountable for the PM team who is responsible for this, it is on you. Do not get your PMs to respond.
• Should I give the timeline of how we got here? Should I justify the reasons (however valid they may be)? Absolutely NO.
• Do you need to huddle together, get the latest, and send a detailed response? NO.

The First Response template

I acknowledge your concern and understand the importance of this project / feature. We have already started working on it. I will be on point to send you regular updates as we make progress on this.

• Acknowledge the situation.
• Give confidence that you are aligned and have started work already.
• Zero justifications / history. That prolongs this. Trust me. Your Leadership team does not want to get into the justification game. In fact they would be obliged to add their thoughts on that, and it is just not the time, and you dont want it.
• End the mail with the third sentence volunteering yourself to be the point contact and take it upon yourself to give regular updates to that email thread.
• Let your team know that discussions can happen with the partners and internally, but you are the only one who is going to reply on top of this thread going forward.

And then in subsequent updates, up-level the discussion on summarizing the need, the challenges, where the team is, and how the progress is happening - in a maximum of 3-4 bullets. This is what would make the leaders on the email confident and relieved.

Trust me, their team folks got them to +1 on their escalation. They have a ton of other work to do than follow up on this, and understand deeper on who messed up, or why things are getting delayed (in most cases). Always build up on the previous mail and give line of sight to when it is going to finish. Name the updates as "Update 1", "Update 2", ... etc.

All the best. Hope this helps in diffusing any escalation that might come your way. You now know how to handle it.