Execute or Escalate: the leadership phrase that changes everything.

CRE Success Principle: Indecision can be more damaging than mistakes. People grow faster, and you will free up more time, when others know it is better to act or escalate than to just sit on a problem and do nothing.

One of the biggest challenges for commercial real estate principals is decision overload.

Too many leaders find themselves making choices that their people should be handling. The result is frustration, wasted time, and slower business growth.

That’s why I recommend embedding the phrase “execute or escalate” into your culture.

Why It Works

Your team needs clarity on when to act and when to ask for help. If a task is within their role and they have enough information, they should execute. If it’s outside their pay grade or carries significant risk, they should escalate. What they should never do is sit in indecision.

Guardrails and Structure

To make this work, set clear boundaries. Define the dollar amounts, client types, and risks that require escalation. Then create structured time, like weekly one-on-one meetings, so escalations don’t overwhelm you.

Culture of Trust

When you reward action and support escalation, you build a culture of empowerment. Mistakes will happen, but they’re far less damaging than paralysis.

If you want your team to step up and your business to run more smoothly, start using “execute or escalate.” I explain exactly how to apply it in episode 240 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership.

Episode transcript:

Today's episode is all about encouraging leaders to adopt a culture in their business where their team members take initiative.

That is, they execute or they seek support when necessary—that is, they escalate—rather than sitting in indecision, deferring responsibility, or clogging up your time with avoidable approvals.

So, let's get into how you can embed a culture where your team instinctively executes or escalates.

This is episode 240 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. My name's Darren Krakowiak. I help commercial real estate principals lead their people to better performance, grow revenue in their business faster, and have less stress in their lives.

I really enjoyed, in our last episode, telling you all about Sales Management as a Service, which is delivered through our Agent Accelerator program, where we upgrade the skills of agents, elevate their mindset, and give them the accountability they need to grow their GCI within one year by $100,000.

If you're a commercial real estate agent and you would like to know more about that, you can go to cresuccess.co/agents

The part about elevating mindset is really important, and we've just brought on a great mindset coach. We've had some fantastic feedback from our members about that mindset session.

Just the other day, as I was walking past Coles—a supermarket in Australia—I was reminded about the impact mindset work can have on an individual.

I saw a young guy, maybe a university student, handing over a $5 note to somebody in need, a homeless person who I’ve seen regularly outside our local Coles.

I thought, I wonder if this guy can afford to hand over the $5 when he looks like a student. Then I remembered the abundance training I did a few years ago. It was an audio program, part of money manifestation and abundance training that I did.

It helped me have a more positive and healthy relationship with money, as opposed to coming at money from a scarcity mindset. It helped me be more generous in my approach with money.

One of the exercises was to keep $5 notes in your wallet and hand them out whenever anyone in need asked for money.

That exercise was one of the best exercises in that overall program for me.  Because wouldn't have been something that I would have done in the past.

When someone asked me for $1 or $2, I wouldn’t have given them $5.  That was something I wouldn't have done in the past, but I did that and it helped.

Now, I'm not saying that you can just do that exercise and you're going to have an improved relationship with and a more abundance attitude towards money because it was part of a 30- or 40-day audio program that I listened to.

But that exercise stuck with me. When I saw somebody hand over $5, I was reminded of how I now have a better relationship with money as a result of that mindset work. That’s why mindset is part of the overall delivery inside CRE Success Agent Accelerator.

So, if you'd like to know more about the program, go to cresuccess.co/agents. We'll put the details in the show notes.

Right, so today I want to give you a phrase that can change how your team operates. It can free up your time and also shift your culture towards empowerment and accountability. That phrase is: execute or escalate.

The problem here, and it’s pretty common, is commercial real estate principals getting bogged down by decisions that others could and should be making.

It’s not that their people are lazy. It’s that they haven’t been given the tools, the framework, the guidance on when to take action and when to seek direction.

This is where the execute-or-escalate mindset comes in.  Because we want to get people to understand that if it is within their scope and they’ve got the information they need to move forward, they should have a bias towards acting—they should execute.

If it’s outside their pay grade or if there’s significant risk involved, then they should escalate.

What we don’t want is for people to do nothing. We don’t want them to sit on it. We want them to pick one: execute or escalate.

And in terms of implementing this in your business, I think we need to have the right structure in place that allows this to thrive. That means regular check-ins for legitimate escalations, preferably in the form of scheduled one-on-one meetings or at least regular team meetings.

We want to encourage team members to come up with a recommendation or a couple of choices when they do come to you, when they escalate things. So, get them to start thinking about how they would handle particular issues.

A good frame is: give me two choices when you come to me with a problem. Don’t just bring me the problem. Give me an A or a B, and we can pick one—or come up with another solution.

We also want to make sure people understand their role, that expectations are clearly communicated, and they know what they’re responsible for.

And while they know what they're responsible for, and they're acting within their realm of responsibility, we want to make it clear that it's okay if sometimes mistakes are made from time to time because that is better than indecision or going silent.

So, the title of this episode, Execute or Escalate, was inspired by one of my clients.  I think it's not unfair to say that he’s been burning the candle at both ends, working far longer hours than I’d recommend—probably 12 hours at least—making decisions for everyone and not getting the support he needs.

Once we were talking about what he needed to get done, we came up with this simple phrase: execute or escalate. Things started to shift. His managers started to make more of their own decisions and owning their area responsibilities.

 The questions that they were asking him started to become more pointed, and people were taking some of the responsibility off his shoulders.

Even when they were escalating, they were coming to him with solutions as opposed to just coming to him with problems. That creates a shift in culture.

He even joked that he likes this new catchphrase—execute or escalate. I told him: use it. That’s how leadership systems are built, from little phrases like that.

We also want to set guardrails so people know when escalation should occur. For example, if a decision requires a certain spend, it should be escalated. You might empower people by saying: if you can solve this problem for $100 or $200, just go ahead. That’s within your realm of responsibility.

We might decide that there are certain VIP clients where you may want to be across more detail than is typical. In which case, you should state that and therefore your people will know that you want to be kept informed with that particular VIP client or set of VIP clients.

And if there's a scenario that presents risk to the client, risk to the business risk to the employee, then that should also be escalated.

And if people are unsure, if they don't know, what we want to let them know is that they're not going to get in trouble for escalating.

We want to create a safe environment where people can come to you and ask for guidance when needed because they're not doing the wrong thing if they’re executing or they're escalating. They're not just sitting in indecision or doing nothing, which is what we don't want.

So, your action item from this episode: if you like the frame “execute or escalate,” bring it up at your next team meeting. Start talking about it more often. Let your team know what it means to you and to them.

By doing so, you’re letting them know they have your trust in a whole range of areas — particularly if you want to set the guardrails and state the expectations around what it is that you want them to execute on.

And then if you back it up with structured time to deal with escalations, to let them know that we've got a certain amount of time every single week in the diary, but also if there's something which rises to a certain level, that's particularly important, that if you need to escalate, then that is also perfectly fine as well.

And of course, we can back this up with a lot of encouragement, a lot of positive reinforcement when people are doing a great job and when they're executing on their own.

We want to always reward desirable behaviors, so they’re reinforced and continue in the business.

So, remember the phrase: execute or escalate.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.