The client is not the bottleneck
Before blaming the approver for a stalled approval, look at what got sent. Five stakeholders, no deadline, and a "thoughts?" is not a process.
“Still waiting on the client.”
It might be the most common status update in this industry, delivered with a small practiced sigh, and it’s almost always a misdiagnosis. When an approval sits untouched for two weeks, the instinct is to blame the approver. Look upstream instead. The approval didn’t stall because the client is slow. It stalled because the ask was built to stall, and nobody noticed, because nobody thinks of an approval as something that gets built.
We do. An approval is an interface: a thing a busy human has to operate under time pressure, usually on a phone, between meetings that have nothing to do with you. Interfaces get designed. So before the sigh, run the autopsy. Five questions, in order.
- What exactly did we ask for? Scroll back to the actual message. “Thoughts?” is not an ask. Neither is a forty-page PDF trailing a “let us know.” An approvable ask names the decision: approve the homepage direction, pick option A or B, confirm the copy on these three screens. If the recipient has to first figure out what a yes would even cover, they’ll postpone the figuring, indefinitely, without malice.
- Who did we ask? Five names on the To line means no names on the To line. An approval addressed to a committee is homework nobody was assigned, and each recipient is quietly certain someone else is handling it. One decider, named in advance, ideally in the contract. Everyone else moves to CC, where opinions are welcome and votes are not.
- When did we need it by? An ask without a date isn’t a request, it’s a suggestion. And a bare date is only slightly better. The version that works carries its reason with it: by Thursday, because Friday we book the photographer and the rate goes up. Deadlines with consequences attached get met. The decorative kind get treated as decoration.
- How much work is saying yes? Count the steps between opening the message and finishing the job. If the path involves downloading anything, cross-referencing two documents, or remembering what changed since the last round, it’s too long. We lead with what changed, then the one question that needs answering, then the material, in that order. Reviewing should take minutes. Deciding is the hard part, and it deserves all the energy the process didn’t waste.
- What happens on silence? Most approval processes treat silence as a void, and voids have no schedule. Define the default instead, out loud, at kickoff: if we don’t hear back by the date, we proceed with the recommended option. Suddenly silence is a decision with an owner rather than a delay with nobody’s name on it. Clients don’t resent this. They tend to relax, because the project just proved it can’t be accidentally parked.
Run the autopsy honestly and a pattern emerges fast. Approvals that fly through arrive looking like a decision. The ones that rot arrive looking like work, and busy people triage work the way anyone does: the vague and the optional sink to the bottom of the pile, underneath everything with a name and a date on it. Your homepage isn’t competing with the client’s laziness. It’s competing with their entire inbox, and it showed up dressed worse than everything else in there.
Notice whose behavior those five questions examine. Not the client’s. Ours. Every failure point sits on our side of the send button, which is inconvenient for the sigh but excellent news for the fix, because our side of the send button is the only side we control.
The same team that will spend a week debating a button label will fire off an approval request with no named decider, no deadline, and no clear question, then diagnose the client as the problem. We’ve done it too. The cure is remembering that the approval is part of the deliverable, not the paperwork around it.
Design it like you’d design anything else. Then, if it still stalls, fine, blame the client.
It just almost never gets that far.
