the way we manage this sort of thing in our system is that one or more of the approvals directs that approver to change the status.
For example in a recent request workflow, we have the following:
New-pending approval (Approver please change status to "writer required")
Writer required-pending approval (Approver please do some work, change the status to Writing complete)
Writing complete-pending approval (Writing Complete is equivalent to a "Closed" status, so approving this effectively closes this request)