Senior Managers Overly Focused on Lower-Level Decisions

From Corporate Strategy Board:

'Heard in the Suite' - Emerging Trend: Senior Managers Overly Focused on Lower-Level Decisions
This feature highlights member quotes that represent 1) Emerging Trends, 2) Challenges to Conventional Wisdom, or 3) Under-Reported News.
"Everyone is going through controlled chaos," a senior executive recently explained to us. In periods of economic stress, company decision processes tend to get over-burdened by anxious senior managers who try to assert control and end up injecting themselves into decisions that shouldn't reach their pay grade. Junior people, who get nervous about making a wrong step, escalate decisions that probably could be worked out at a lower level. Having senior people spending their time on too junior decisions means the company risks seeing the next big threat or opportunity on the horizon. To overcome this, one executive enunciated his goal: "we need to rationalize our processes globally so that we can better understand where we are exposed to risk."