to kick upstairs
- phrasal verb
- Informal
:
elevar
- After several meetings with no agreement, they opted to kick upstairs the request for funding to the executive team.
Examples
-
When the committee couldn't reach a conclusion, they decided to kick upstairs the issue to the board for clarification.
-
By the time it was determined that Krause and Linville were in a state of religious hysteria, Stillano had come on board, and quickly the decisions were kicked upstairs.
Fiction book (2000) -
The manager chose to kick upstairs the dispute to the company president for a final ruling.
Synonyms
4
6.7
Send a matter or problem to another person to decide
To ask a higher manager to decide about a problem
To let someone else decide what to do next
Antonyms
How High
Surface Forms
Morphology
kick + upstairs
The components 'kick' (to push/remove) and 'upstairs' (to a higher level) give a plausible spatial metaphor for moving something to a higher authority, so a learner might infer the general idea of 'escalate' or 'pass up'. However, the exact pragmatic sense—referring responsibility or promoting someone as a way of removing them—is a metaphorical extension and not fully predictable from the parts, so prior exposure is often needed for the precise meaning.
Etymology
Kick upstairs may come from the picture of pushing a problem upstairs to a higher office so someone else must decide. So it means 'send a decision or responsibility to someone more senior'.