Leave request auto approvals for Higher-level managers

We have an institution President where the Reports-To on the Job Data is set to themselves (a President reporting to the President as themself). In Absence Management, the AbsenceManagement workflow errors since it is looking upon Position Management to determine the routing to the manager. Since the manager is the same as the requestor or has the same Operator ID, the workflow runs to Error and Skips the operator and the errors generated are sent to the multiple approvers or the Workflow Admins (or however you wish to define this).

When an employee has a Report's To of themself, how has other institutions enabled auto-approval of leave requests for this one or a group of employees only?