Help preventing status change in Team-Managed Project

[Melissa Pershing]

I have a Team-Managed project with a basic workflow.  First level of approval requires 1 of 3 people to approve or reject.  If approved it moves to the next approval step.

Second level approval requires all to approve. If approved it moves along to the next process.

I'd like both rejection paths to restrict this transition if the "Decline" button is selected AND the field 'Reason for Rejection" is blank.

I've tried every combination of rules and validation I can think of and none of them are preventing the status transition.  HELP.  Its like they aren't even running.

I tried to check to see if the value was blank and made sure the context box was selected.

I tried to restrict the transition when a field is a specific value (check that the value in "reason for rejection" is not empty.

[Melissa Pershing]

Essentially this is what I need to be implemented. https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-6989

But I need to know how to create an automation now that will handle it without having to move into a Company-Managed project and setup resolution screens.  The feature disparity is unfortunate!