Administration
Approvals and delegation
Multi-step chains, thresholds, and the narrow case where somebody may approve their own request.
The control is that nobody approves their own request while somebody above them could. The subject is removed from every step's pool of approvers before anything else is decided, so self-approval can never fall out of somebody happening to be their own manager or the only HR administrator on a step.
But the blanket rule is wrong in a way that corrupts data
A managing director, a sole owner or a founder has no manager. Told they may not approve their own leave, they do not escalate to nobody — they stop recording leave. The absence figures then become least reliable for exactly the people whose absence matters most.
So self-approval is permitted narrowly: only when the chain resolves to nobody else, only when the policy allows it, and always recorded as a self-approval so it is distinguishable in an audit from an ordinary decision. Somebody who *has* a manager never self-approves, whatever the policy says.
Delegation
- A delegation adds an approver, it never replaces one. The delegator is usually away rather than gone, and refusing an approval they can still make would be perverse.
- Delegations are dated and expire by themselves. One that has to be cancelled by hand is one still live three months after the holiday.
- A delegation can never make somebody their own approver.
- Cancelling a delegation that has already started ends it today rather than deleting it, because a decision may record having been made through it.
Steps and thresholds
Steps carry thresholds, so escalation is configuration rather than code — a second signature above ten days, for example. A request nobody can action is reported as blocked, loudly; an HR administrator is the last resort even where the policy did not name one.
A chain with neither self-approval nor an HR fallback is refused
It would save cleanly and then block a managing director's own request permanently.
Managers across entities
A manager need not be in the same legal entity as their report, and often is not. The policy comes from the subject's jurisdiction; who approves comes from the reporting line, and the two are independent. Somebody holding two engagements normally has two managers, and a leave request anchored to one engagement routes to that line.