This article was inspired by a real experience as CFO of Redal, a particular experience that senior leaders will recognise. The same category of problem arrived on my desk, month after month, presenting themselves with a slightly different twist each time.
The commercial director and I, as CFO, resolved it, we thought we had moved on, and within weeks it returned in a new form, carried by a different team member, attached to a different customer or project.
The instinct in that moment was to question the people involved, to wonder whether the commercial and financial teams below us were competent enough.
In my experience, a more productive question is whether the organisation’s design is producing the problem predictably, regardless of who happens to be in the roles.
I spent 37 years in executive finance roles across five countries before becoming a systemic team coach, and I sat with this exact frustration more than once.
What I learnt is that recurring escalation is a signal about structure and processes, not people. When you read it that way, the intervention becomes really specific, and the financial return becomes surprisingly clear.
The Escalation Trap
When decisions that belong at branch or team level consistently travel upward, the organisation has failed to establish clear accountability at the right level. The people closest to the problem lack either the authority to act or the certainty that acting is genuinely their responsibility.
So the issue rises, gathering urgency and emotional charge, until it lands with the CEO or CFO as something that now requires senior attention. By that point it has usually become more expensive to resolve than it ever needed to be.
The cost of this trap deserves to be stated clearly, because it doesn’t appear in any management account. Leadership time is the most expensive resource in the business, and every hour spent resolving an escalation, a problem that the structure should have absorbed is an hour withdrawn from strategy, from market response, from the work only senior leaders can do.
Capable people in the organisation spend their energy navigating internal complexity, checking who owns what, seeking permission they were never explicitly granted, rather than creating value for customers.
These costs add up quietly, and over time they erode competitive advantage without ever appearing as a line item.
This is commonly misread as a performance issue. Leaders commission training, replace individuals, or add coordination meetings, and the symptom persists because the intervention targets the wrong level of the system. The people were rarely the cause. The design was.
What I Learnt as CFO at Redal
Let me ground this in an experience I briefly mentioned at the beginning of this article. During the first year as CFO at Redal, customer complaints were regularly escalated to the commercial director and to me personally, and by the time they reached us they had often progressed to the stage of pre-litigation. Some complaints were escalated to the CEO directly through external stakeholders, sometimes at very high levels.
Each case consumed senior leadership time, legal attention, and goodwill with customers whose frustration had increased precisely because resolution had taken so long.
The easy reading of the situation would have been that the people handling complaints were underperforming. I have to say that, having recently taken over the company and not yet very familiar with the middle management, the thought crossed our minds more than once.
We ran a proper cause analysis instead, and it revealed something quite different. Branch managers, the people closest to the customer and best placed to resolve issues early, had neither clearly defined authority to settle complaints nor unambiguous responsibility for doing so.
In the absence of that clarity, escalation was the rational choice for every individual in the chain. Every manager was responding sensibly to an ambiguous structure, and the structure was producing pre-litigation cases on a reliable schedule.
There was also a cultural issue with Moroccan customers not trusting branch managers and willing to escalate their complaints to senior leaders in order to get a better result.
The solution was in fixing the company culture around delegation and the process. We clarified the role and responsibilities of branch managers for complaint resolution, established a clear delegation framework with defined thresholds, and put a straightforward process around it. The number and cost of escalated complaints fell significantly.
The managers had been capable all along, but the previous organisation was not trusting them, and the moment the senior leadership team allowed them to act, they did. That experience twenty-five years ago reshaped how I think about organisational problems to this day.
What Systemic Team Coaching Actually Does
At Redal we found the cause because we went looking for it deliberately, and that is precisely what systemic team coaching makes possible when a leadership team can’t see the issue from inside.
The work typically begins with individual interviews with each team member and stakeholders, held in confidence, before any group session takes place. It may involve reviewing data or processes to support the inquiry.
People rarely name organisational dysfunction directly, because they experience it as personal frustration rather than as a design issue. They describe its symptoms instead: duplicated effort, decisions that get revisited three times, accountability that seems to sit with no one, energy drained by internal negotiation.
My role as systemic team coach in that inquiry phase is to listen beneath those descriptions and ask open questions to gradually surface what connects them, without leading the discussion and without imposing a diagnosis I arrived with.
The discipline matters. If I walk in with a conclusion, I will find evidence for it, and the team will sense that the exercise was directed.
When the inquiry is genuinely open, what emerges is a picture of how the system actually behaves, which is often quite different from how each person assumed it behaved from their own position within it.
The subsequent workshop brings the full team to that same picture. This is where the real shift happens, because shared understanding of what is actually occurring creates a quality of alignment that no restructuring announcement or new process document can replicate.
Cultural and organisational issues that were invisible to the leadership team become visible, discussable, and actionable.
In my experience, teams discover that much of what they attributed to personality or politics was structural issues all along, and that discovery is both a relief and a release of energy.
The Financial Translation
I want to make the case in financial language I spent my career using, because this work is too often filed under culture and quietly deprioritised.
Reduced customer dissatisfaction shows up in retention and in the avoided cost of litigation and remediation. Lower cost to serve shows up directly in margin. Senior leadership time returned to strategic work shows up in faster decisions and sharper competitive response, which is harder to measure but visible to anyone who has lived before and after the change in the organisation.
Framed properly, systemic team coaching functions as a structural repair with a measurable return, in the same way the Redal intervention did.
The companies that treat recurring escalation as a people problem will keep paying for the same failure in new forms, year after year.
The companies that treat it as a structural signal tend to find the intervention narrower than they feared and the payback faster than they expected.
That has been true in my own executive career and in the teams I now coach through exactly this kind of work.
A Better Question to Ask
If you are a senior leader the question worth asking first is whether your structure allows the people you lead to do what you hired them to do.
That question changes what you look for when a problem recurs, and it changes what you decide in response.
Instead of another leadership programme or another reorganisation, you commission an honest inquiry into how decisions, authority, and accountability actually flow through your organisation.
To recap what I’ve laid out here: recurring escalation signals a structural cause, the hidden costs of that friction compound into real financial erosion, and a disciplined process of individual interviews followed by whole-team workshops can surface the cause and align the team around repairing it.
The Redal experience twenty-five years ago taught me that capable people act the moment the structure permits them to.
If a familiar problem has landed on your desk again this week, I’d gently suggest that you look first into the structural causes before looking for anyone to blame.
Bruno Vinel
Executive Coach & Systemic Team Coach
Former CFO, general manager and commercial director, with board-level experience across five countries.
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Questions and Answers
In my experience, recurring escalation usually signals that the organisation’s design is producing the problem predictably. When decisions that belong at branch or team level keep travelling upward, the people closest to the issue tend to lack either clear authority to act or certainty that acting is their responsibility. I’ve found it more useful to read recurring escalation as a structural signal before questioning the competence of the people involved.
These costs rarely appear in management accounts. Senior leadership time, the most expensive resource in the business, gets absorbed by issues the structure should have resolved, and capable people spend their energy navigating internal complexity rather than creating value for customers. Over time, the costs add up quietly in slower decisions, a weaker competitive response and eroded margins.
Systemic team coaching works with a leadership team as a whole system, looking at how decisions, authority and accountability actually flow through the organisation. As a systemic team coach, I help teams surface the structural and cultural causes behind recurring problems, so they can address the design of the organisation and stop treating the same symptoms repeatedly.
The work usually begins with confidential individual interviews with each team member and key stakeholders, sometimes supported by a review of data or processes. I listen for what connects the frustrations people describe, and I avoid arriving with a diagnosis of my own. A workshop then brings the full team to a shared picture of how the system actually behaves, which creates the alignment needed to agree on structural changes.
During my first year as CFO at Redal, customer complaints were regularly escalated to the commercial director and to me, often reaching the stage of pre-litigation. A cause analysis showed that branch managers had neither clearly defined authority nor clear responsibility to resolve complaints, and some customers also preferred to go straight to senior leaders. Once we clarified the managers’ role, introduced a delegation framework with defined thresholds and put a simple process around it, the number and cost of escalated complaints fell significantly.
I frame it as a structural repair with a measurable return. Reduced customer dissatisfaction shows up in retention and in avoided litigation costs, a lower cost to serve shows up directly in margin, and leadership time returned to strategic work shows up in faster decisions. In my experience, the intervention is often narrower than leaders fear and the payback faster than they expect.
I’m an executive coach and systemic team coach, and a former CFO with 37 years in executive finance roles across five countries. I work with CEOs, CFOs and senior leadership teams navigating transformation, helping them see the full system they’re operating within so they can lead with clarity.