Every leader I work with can tell me when they step into an escalation. Almost none can state the rule they used.
Try it on your own history. Pull the last five escalations you joined and write the reason next to each one. If the reasons read like account size, a relationship with the customer, or a bad feeling at 9pm, there is no entry rule operating. There is a reflex, and your organization has learned to trigger it.
Entry thresholds that hold look like this: business impact crossing a defined line, regulatory or legal exposure, a customer executive escalating to your level, or a commercial commitment above a set limit. Notice what is missing. How important the logo is. How loud the customer is. How nervous you feel.
Somebody tested whether writing the threshold down in advance beats deciding case by case. Economists ran a randomized experiment across 600 procurement officers and published it in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. One group needed approval on every purchase. The other got a written limit they could act under on their own. The officers working to a written limit paid 9 percent less for the same items, and the gain showed up only where the approver had been the one holding things up.
A number agreed in a calm week beat judgment applied under pressure. That is the whole case for having a rule.
The objection is fair. Thresholds feel rigid and escalations are messy. A written rule does not remove judgment from the room. It removes the argument about whose judgment applies.
Next week: the move almost nobody has ever been trained to make.
An executive with an entry rule is an executive whose presence in the room means something.
Take the free Authority Leak Scorecard.
Source: Oriana Bandiera, Michael Best, Adnan Khan and Andrea Prat, "The Allocation of Authority in Organizations: A Field Experiment with Bureaucrats," Quarterly Journal of Economics 136(4), 2021.