Responsibility is greater than authority

One of the common things that managers find difficult is situations where their responsibility does not correspond directly with their authority.

In the past, managers were accountable for things that were directly in their line of authority. It was accepted that you can hold a person accountable for something, only if he has authority over it. This was tolerable in the highly hierarchical organizations of the past where changes both in the organization and the environment were minor, although occasionally you would encounter failures in situations where the responsibility for something was not well defined and things were falling “between the lines”.

The situation today is blurry. The business environment changes rapidly, this causes several things, among them:
1. Organizations become more and more complex.
2. It is almost impossible to define clear and rigid borders between different roles / positions.

To cope with the rate of change a manager needs to be responsible and cope with many issues which couldn’t be defined in advance.
It is obvious that even in the past the definition of responsibility for a certain position should have been broader than the authority, nowadays it is mandatory!
So, how do you convey this
“inconvenient truth” to a manager?
Usually the conversation goes like this: Senior manager “Do you remember that situation? We think you should have done that…” Junior manager “How could I have done it? I am not responsible for that budget, I don’t have the resources required to take action.”
Having been through many of such conversations, this is what we usually do in such situations:
We start with ourself, trying to understand if we’re behaving as a good role models. How do we act in similar situations? It is not possible to convey such a message if you are not up to it yourself!
One other benefit we gain from this self examination is gathering examples of right and wrong from our experience.
Usually we explain rationally why it is mandatory that responsibility exceeds authority.
We discuss the situation at hand and give examples of how we would have dealt with the situation given the lack of authority. We think that it is very useful to share situations from one’s own experience – explain how we did act, what was good and what was wrong in the actions we have taken or avoided taking.
The problem is universal, the larger the manager you become, the larger the gap between your authority and responsibility. Making this distinction (that responsibility > authority) clear is not an easy task. As we develop and grow as managers we are able to contain and stretch the gap between authority and responsibility. Or maybe it is the other way around – the more we are able to stretch the gap between responsibility and authority, the bigger the situations we can handle and the larger the managers we become.