Flip the org chart to create empowered teams

When FieldCo, a mid-size telecom installer, began falling behind its rivals on customer satisfaction, new CEO Maria scanned her org chart and saw too many “To: Manager” requests on routine issues. Calls about missed appointments or broken equipment stacked up, and frontline crews felt powerless.

Maria rallied her first five—operations, HR, customer service, finance and IT heads—and charged them with flipping the decision pyramid upside down. They sketched the current hierarchy and catalogued the top ten decisions that installers escalated weekly. Then came the tough question: “Could our installers decide on compensation offers up to £50 without a stamp from above?” The quick answer was yes, if given clear guidelines.

Over six weeks they trained supervisors in micro-modules so the frontline could choose compensation, reschedule visits and even swap service partners when safety standards were at risk. The change empowered crews to solve most problems in real time. Within three months, call escalations dropped by 60% and customer satisfaction jumped from 70% to 88%.

The lesson was stark: inverting the pyramid doesn’t undermine control—it accelerates service, builds trust and signals a culture of local ownership. Installers no longer felt like cogs in a machine; they owned the outcome.

You sketch out your org’s current layers, then poll your frontline for the ten most common decisions they have to escalate. Next, you push each one down a level by simply asking if it could be safely made closer to the customer. Finally, you create a 15-minute training capsule—case examples, clear guardrails and FAQs—so your newly empowered team can act confidently. This rapid shift builds local ownership, slashes wait times and turns your support center into an accelerator rather than a bottleneck. Try mapping one process this afternoon.