The Hidden Cost of Approval Chains: Reclaiming a Day Every Week

Approval chains are rarely designed. They accumulate one cautious decision at a time until a simple purchase needs four signatures and a week. Nobody designs an approval chain; they accumulate. How to find the ones costing your team a day a week, and what to replace them with.

Find the approvals that cost the most

List every approval your team requested last month, with the time each one waited. Sort by waiting time multiplied by frequency. The top five usually account for more than half of the delay, and most of them protect against risks that no longer exist.

Replace approval with limits and review

For routine decisions, give people a spending or discount limit and review a sample after the fact. You keep control of the outliers, the team stops waiting, and managers get back the hours they spent clicking approve on things they never read.

How we apply this with clients

In client work this usually becomes one priority on the quarterly plan, with a named owner and a measure the leadership team reviews every month. Our operations partners start with a short diagnostic of where the business is today, then agree the smallest change that will make a visible difference within ninety days.

Want to apply this in your business? Book a discovery call with a Maia Lafortezza partner.