When your team escalates to you, it is not always necessary (or wise) to "accept" the escalation. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to hand the problem back. That doesn't mean being unhelpful, though! The HBR article provides a set of really good questions to help frame these kinds of conversations:

• “What have you tried?”
• “Who—or what—is getting in the way of tackling this?” helps you get to the root of what’s stopping them from solving the problem themself.
• “What support do you need?”
• “What would you do if you were in my seat?”
• “Is there anything else I should know?” leaves them to solve the problem while validating your support.

In most large organizations, a typical CEO’s or senior executive’s calendar is clogged with 1:1 meetings. These are usually seen as necessary for alignment, decision-making, or relationship management. But at the top of an enterprise, the very structure of these meetings is working against the organization’s best interests. While there’s lots of information available about how to optimize or improve your 1:1 meetings, no amount of improvement will help meetings that shouldn’t be happening in the first place. The alternative is to re-engineer the way executive time is used. Instead of relying on 1:1s for operational discussions, CEOs and senior executives should convene small, cross-functional “capability meetings”: 1:2 or 1:3 conversations that reflect how value is actually created.

Interesting article! This makes a lot of sense to me. I'd be super curious to know what C-suite folks think.