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When changes and improvement suggestions regularly fizzle out, many people first blame the management system. They call it too bureaucratic, too confusing, or too complicated. Yet the tool itself is not to blame. The real reason is surprisingly simple: there are too many approval stages.
More approval stages don't solve a quality problem. They highlight one.
Approvals have a firm place in every functional management system, especially where changes have real impacts on safety, compliance, customers, or production. You can't do without them entirely. However, in many organizations, they have emerged more from a need for security than from genuine professional necessity.
This leads to setups like these:
This doesn't have much to do with quality assurance anymore—it's traffic jam management.
The more approval stages a proposal has to go through, the higher the probability that exactly what was meant to be prevented will happen: the system is weakened and loses its effectiveness.
In a LinkedIn poll in January 2025, I asked: “On average, how long does it take for a process change to be approved and communicated?”
The results from 77 votes:
More than a third wait longer than three months for a process change. This is practically unthinkable in a world where requirements, priorities, and conditions are changing faster than ever.
Looking at the number of approval levels, things don't necessarily look any better:
While more than half of the 121 survey participants state that they only need one to two approval rounds, 41% of respondents have to overcome three or more stages. In practice, once you reach three stages, it is rarely about quality assurance anymore, and approval stages become a brake on innovation.
Many approval chains look as if the organizational chart was simply translated into a workflow: everything has to be escalated as high as possible. This pattern is often driven by a desire for personal security, unclear roles, or a lack of trust.
The logic: too many cooks don't necessarily spoil the broth. But if they do, the responsibility doesn't fall on any single person.
The problem: hierarchy alone is not a quality criterion. Proximity to the process is. But that falls by the wayside when all changes have to cross the desk of top management. While they may have authority, they do not necessarily have the practical knowledge required for the decision.
Hierarchical approval loops may produce security on paper, but they come at the expense of speed, agility, and ownership.
An uncontrolled proliferation of approval loops is often a symptom of a lack of clear process ownership. Because when it isn't defined who is authorized to approve a change, everyone who is involved in any way is simply asked.
In practice, this creates new problems: what happens if four out of five people agree – and one doesn't? You quickly end up at a dead end.
An effective lever, therefore, lies not in additional control instances, but in clear "rules of the game." Those who define these properly usually need significantly fewer approval stages and achieve better results.
You can't do without approvals entirely in everyday work. The solution is therefore: well-thought-out approvals. They should be set as low as possible and only as high as necessary, and should take place where...
Escalation levels should only be triggered when there is a strategic, legal, or financial necessity—not just as a matter of principle. Since approval layers often arise from ambiguity rather than genuine need, many bottlenecks disappear once it is clearly defined who makes the decision, who needs to be informed, and who is professionally (not legally) accountable.
Clear roles and responsibilities are one thing. Equally important is a system that makes processes visible. After all, changes submitted by employees that quietly vanish into the corporate void will sooner or later lead to frustration.
To foster a sense of involvement and progress, a system (e.g., process management software) must make the gears turning in the background visible:
Transparency doesn't replace decision-making, but it does make decisions understandable. This often reduces resistance more effectively than adding another approval layer.
A living management system thrives when people contribute. Processes are questioned, improved, and adapted to new requirements. Knowledge is shared, and experience flows back into the system. This is exactly what continuous improvement is all about.
However, if approval chains are designed to avoid change, the result is a quiet but lifeless system. Improvements take forever, engagement drops, and the management system drifts further and further away from daily reality. And that truly helps no one.
If you want engagement, you must design approval processes so they don't become a barrier to entry.
Anyone suggesting fewer approval levels often encounters the ultimate conversation-stopper: "If we loosen the rules, chaos will break out!" The honest answer to that: If your organization descends into disorder because of fewer (not zero!) approvals, the real problem lies elsewhere. To get to the bottom of it, it helps to ask yourself the following question:
Do additional approval stages actually prevent chaos, or do they just mask it?
Because fewer approvals don't create chaos: they make it visible where things were already stalling. Visibility is the first step toward cleaning up that disorder.
What does an ideal approval process look like? And how many stages make sense? Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. However, based on our experience working with various organizations, one setup has proven effective: two approval stages. Every additional layer doesn't add quality; it just adds wait time.
Stage 1: Content approval
Stage 2: Formal approval
Two approval stages – that’s all you need in most cases. Lean enough not to slow down participation, yet robust enough to comply with regulatory and normative requirements.
If you’re unsure whether your approvals are still ensuring quality or have already become bureaucratic, a quick reality check helps.
Which of these apply to your organization?
If you can check off several of these points, it is worth taking a closer look at your approval setup.
A good management system requires control.
A living management system requires participation.
The art lies in combining both and supporting people in improving processes together.
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