Most approval delays aren’t caused by the people who say no. They’re caused by the people who were never meant to say anything at all.
Anyone who has shepherded a press release, a CEO letter, or a client announcement through a mid-sized organization knows the pattern. The draft goes out to eight people. Three respond quickly. Two respond with conflicting edits. One forwards it to a colleague you’ve never met, who has thoughts about the headline. Another doesn’t respond until the day before launch, at which point they’d like to revisit the core message. The work is fine. The process is the problem.
It’s tempting to treat this as a discipline issue: people should review faster, edit less, and respect deadlines. But approval bloat is almost never the result of bad behavior. It’s the result of a system that rewards adding reviewers and offers no reason to remove them.
Why approval lists only grow
Every name on an approval list was added for a reason. Someone was surprised by an announcement once, so they were added. A product claim needed legal review, so legal was added to everything. A regional leader felt overlooked, so all regional leaders were added. Each decision was rational on its own. Together, they produce a process where a routine LinkedIn post needs the same sign-off as an earnings release.
The asymmetry is the issue. Adding a reviewer feels like risk reduction. Removing one feels like risk creation. No one gets credit for a lean approval chain, but someone always gets blamed for the person who was left out.
So the list accretes. And because no one owns the whole system, no one prunes it.
The confusion of input versus approval
The single most useful distinction in communication approvals is between people who contribute to the work and people who authorize it. Organizations blur these constantly, and the blur is expensive.
When a subject-matter expert is asked to “approve” a draft, they reasonably assume they have license to reshape it. When a senior leader receives a near-final document with an approval request, they assume their job is to find something to improve. Ask someone to sign off and you’ll get edits. Ask them to confirm facts and you’ll usually get confirmation.
A useful stakeholder map separates four roles:
- The decider. One person, occasionally two, who owns the final call. If you can’t name this person, you don’t have an approval process. You have a consensus exercise.
- Required reviewers. People who own a specific risk, such as legal, compliance, or investor relations. Their review is mandatory but scoped. Compliance confirms the disclosure language; compliance does not weigh in on tone.
- Contributors. People whose knowledge shapes the content: product leads, practice heads, analysts. Their input belongs early, at the brief or first-draft stage, not at the end.
- The informed. People who need to see it before it goes public so they aren’t caught off guard. They don’t have a veto, and they need to know that.
Most approval chains collapse the last three categories into the first. Everyone becomes a decider by default, which means no one is.
Map by risk, not by rank
The instinct is to build approval lists around seniority and org charts. A better approach is to build them around the specific risks a piece of content carries.
Ask what could actually go wrong. Is there a factual accuracy risk? Then the person who owns the facts reviews for accuracy. A regulatory risk? Compliance reviews the relevant claims. A relationship risk, such as naming a partner or client? The relationship owner confirms. A reputational or strategic risk? That’s the decider’s job.
Anyone who doesn’t own one of those risks belongs in the informed column. This sounds blunt, and in practice it requires some diplomacy. But it reframes the conversation from “who matters” to “who is accountable for what,” which is a far easier conversation to have with a senior colleague.
Tier the content, not just the people
Not everything deserves the same scrutiny. A social post that repackages approved messaging carries very different risk from a statement about a leadership change. Yet many organizations route both through the same chain because building separate paths feels like extra work.
It’s worth the work. A simple three-tier model goes a long way. Low-risk content draws on pre-approved messaging and needs one reviewer. Moderate-risk content needs the decider and any relevant required reviewers. High-risk content, such as anything market-moving, legally sensitive, or tied to a transaction, gets the full map. In regulated environments, this tiering is also what makes compliance sustainable: reviewers can focus on the material that actually needs them.
The key is to build the map once per content type, not once per piece. If every announcement triggers a fresh negotiation about who should see it, the map isn’t doing its job.
Make “informed” mean something
The hardest part of slimming an approval chain is the human part. Being moved from approver to informed can feel like a demotion, and people will resist it if “informed” means “finds out from the newsletter.”
So make it real. Give the informed group a genuine preview window with enough time to flag a serious concern, such as a factual error or a conflict nobody else could have seen. Make clear that serious concerns will be heard. Then be equally clear that preferences about wording are welcome but not binding.
Most people, it turns out, don’t want to approve things. They want not to be surprised. Solve for that, and much of the resistance dissolves.
The real payoff from communication approvals
A well-built stakeholder map doesn’t just speed up approvals. It changes the quality of the work. Contributors engage earlier, when their input can shape the thinking. Required reviewers concentrate on the risks they own. Deciders make decisions instead of refereeing edits. And communicators spend their time on substance rather than version control.
The map is a negotiation you have once so you don’t have to keep having it. That’s a trade most organizations would take, if someone would just put it on the table.
If your approval process has become everyone’s process, it may be worth stepping back to redraw the map. We’re always happy to compare notes.