You know you deescalate well when your own employer starts sending you its fires. In my case it happened twice.
Both times the official reason was resources. In truth it was about something else. A client was unhappy with the care from the previous team, and I was to take over. No technical emergency, no acute gap. A relationship problem packaged as a capacity question.
The first case was a banking client that ran only part of its processes through the system, more the commercial side than the actual banking business. To the operator, that made it a smaller fish. Other clients were bigger, more lucrative, more interesting, and got the time. There was neither a technical problem nor a real gap in operations. What was missing was appreciation. And, once again, communication.
The second case came late in that period, when we had long been running our standard playbook: open communication, realistic planning, and closer care in the hard phases. The client was caught by that alone. Here too the pattern was a matter of personal attention, not a hard technical issue.
What an internal handover reveals
What is interesting is what such an internal switch says about both sides. About the giving team, little can be claimed in general, because the causes vary: overload, wrong priorities, missing experience. It would actually be the leaders‘ job to recognize and solve that, especially once an internal handover is even up for debate. Because that debate is itself already a signal.
And about the receiving team? It gets ennobled, at least as the rescuer in need. That is pleasant, but it obscures the uncomfortable core of the matter. In most of these cases the problem was never the machine. It was that someone did not feel seen. A service provider that redistributes its own escalations internally is voting with its feet on where it believes people are listened to.
When an internal handover is being discussed in your house, that is already a signal: ask why the first team did not get through, before you approve the switch.
Deescalation is rarely a technical discipline. It is the willingness to take a client seriously before they have to get loud. That, of all people, your own employer sends you these cases is the most honest testimonial you can get in this business.
