First published May 2017. I’ve been trying to write about authority, responsibility, accountability, & other properties of productive, functional relationships for a couple of decades. I hope I’m getting close, because there’s a chapter in the new book labelled “Authority & Responsibility”.
Just before writing this I had been on a teaching trip in central & southern Africa. Met some life-long (well, the remainder of it anyway) friends, made some music, & learned about my narrow understanding of people & culture.
I was terrified much of the time I was walking in Lagos. Traffic was chaotic. Drivers were hyperaggressive. Roads were narrow.
There was one time I wasn’t worried: bareheaded on the back of a motorcycle, dodging and weaving through that self-same traffic.
Partly it was because the first thing I did on arriving in Lagos was go to church (a whole other story), which I figured improved my chances of surviving and at least got me into a desirable afterlife should things go sideways. Partly, though, it was because of principles that I find both useful when followed and frequently violated in organizations as they scale.
Thought Experiment
Staying on a motorcycle for the moment, let’s say I ask you to take my bike to the pizza place to pick us up some deep dish. I’m in a hurry, though, so while you can steer, I’m going to control the accelerator from here on the couch. How do you feel about this arrangement?
Okay, little tweak. I’m still going to control the throttle, but I’m going to ride the bike with you. Feel different? Now you get to control both steering and throttle. Different?
Authority and Responsibility
If you work for yourself, by yourself, you don’t even need concepts for authority and responsibility. You make the decisions and do the work and there’s no one else who possibly could. You experience the consequences, all of them, and there’s no one else who possibly could. Becoming aware of authority and responsibility results from scale.
Authority: the right and obligation to make decisions and take action in a given scope
Responsibility: the obligation to accept consequences, good and bad
Two Principles
The problem comes because people are people. We are all subject to loss aversion (where losing $1 feels worse than gaining $1 feels good [ed: see also ergodicity for more perspective]). We are all tempted to free ride (let others do the work while accruing the benefit ourselves). At the same, we all want to be significant, to do important work and be recognized for it.
Two organizational principles reduce the chaos caused by our natural human tendencies:
Responsibility aligns with authority. If I have the authority to make a decision, then I experience the consequences of that decision.
Responsibility comes as a package. If I get the benefits of a good outcome, I also feel the pain of a bad outcome.
A friend called me the other day. She’d been asked to lead a big project to convert the company’s CRM. “Okay, what are the business goals? I’ll be glad to get to work on this.” “No, no, you have to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM.” Bzzzzt.
This situation violates alignment of authority and responsibility. My friend will certainly be punished if the project goes badly, but the single most consequential decision has already been made. Also, this smells like a case where if the project goes well the executive sponsor will get the kudos/bonus/promotion but my friend will get fired if the project goes badly.
She pushed back, pointed out that she was in a no-win position, and told them that without authority to match her responsibility, she wasn’t going to do it. After whining about her not being “a team player”, they gave her the authority.
Steering and Throttle
Now let’s put you back on that crazy remote control motorcycle. When I control the throttle from the couch, I have authority without responsibility. I can make decisions and take action, I benefit from the upside (pizza sooner), but I don’t share in the pain if you crash. Put me on the bike with you and at least we both suffer road rash together. You’d rather control steering and throttle yourself, but it’s better if we share a fate than if we don’t.
That was my thinking in Lagos. If I’m walking on the side of traffic, the worst that could happen to the person who hits me is that they’ll have to repair a dent. On the back of a bike, though, I’m guaranteed that there is one person in the world as interested in my safety as I am.
Followup
Organizational alignment is a huge topic. I’ve only chipped the paint here. More topics for future notes:
How to realign authority and responsibility
My shaky relationship with responsibility
Accountability is a good thing and it’s not the same as blame
I can imagine the effort it must have taken to express this important but simple relationship. I've always felt it from my childhood as a truth but never been that good at explaining it
Now I'm the South of India it felt chaotic but there was definitely a pattern, a flow that came from shared responsibility. It was your responsibility to not hit the person in front of or beside you. All else was noise.
Recently, I started thinking about the root cause of burnout in IT operations jobs (SRE/Platform Engineering, etc.). I'm pretty aware that some problems are universal, and I don't want to say that IT operations is particularly worse or special. But I think there are some patterns that are more common in some jobs than others. In my opinion, IT operations teams are set up in such a way that they have full responsibility but zero authority.
I hope your article will reach as many senior executives as possible since it's a very nice, more general explanation of this problem.