ALL THE Responsibility and NO Authority

Have you been in the situation where you are required to take the responsibility for something but no authority to make anyone help? Rich discusses how to solve this problem.

[Tech_Advisor_to_CXOs]

Rich, thanks for sharing your experience and knowledge with us. I think there are multiple points here:

1) "Exert influence as much as possible before resorting to authority". I completely agree.

2) "Responsibility without authority is a good way of running a team". I disagree. The person who's held responsible for outcomes should have the authority to deliver those outcomes. He should still try to influence first and use authority as a last resort, but he should have that last-resort authority to use when needed, say to point the team in the right direction, stop arguments that repeat every week and rehash the same point, get people to disagree and commit, etc. I've seen startups bogged down because no one has authority, or it's forbidden to exercise authority even when the situation calls for it.

3) Coming specifically to the role of a PM, and taking the example of software (which I'm familiar with, if you excuse me), the product manager decides what features are useful to users, and other stakeholders like engineers and designers can disagree, present arguments, etc, but at the end of the day, the PM gets to decide which features are useful to users. People don't report to the PM, but the PM still has the authority to make calls in his area of work. If not, the PM degenerates into a glorified coordinator, and nobody should take up that job unless they like being an assistant.

4) From your story, it sounds like that company was poorly run and not a good place to work. Your boss should not have said "use the prestigious agency" without giving you a reason. When you came up with reasons, he should not have countered them without giving reasons of his own. He should not have said "If this doesn't work out, your job is on the line" so early in the discussion. That's a line a manager should use only as a last resort. And if he threatens your job, it takes away psychological safety. Stressed people don't perform well. If he's going to threaten your job for a failed project, he should also triple your salary and promote you if the project does well: accountability can't only be punishment without a reward. And he should resign, because he has demonstrated poor judgment in telling you how to run the project, and accountability should apply to the boss as much as it does to underlings. From all these, I feel that's not a place where I'd want to work. Great people can do a great job in a bad company, which your story illustrates, but that's separate from the point of whether one should accept a bad work environment in the first place.

5) I also think we're talking about two kinds of responsibiilty, which, for lack of a better term, I'll call blame responsibility and moral responsibility. If I hire you as a coach, I expect you to have moral responsibility: you've taken up the engagement only because you feel you can make a significant difference, you want to give the best advice possible, if things don't work out, you'll look back and introspect whether you'd do it differently next time, you're willing to step outside your comfort zone to do what's right for me, the coach is not coaching just to make money or embellish his CV, etc. All this is moral responsibility. But if I fail in my job, I won't call you and say "This is your fault, Rich." That's blame responsibility. I can't blame you because maybe you gave me the perfect advise but I was stubborn or closed-minded or whatever and did not implement it. There's no way to evaluate the advice separately from the implementation. In that sense, the advisor doesn't have responsibility, at least not blame-responsibility.


6) I like the concept of DRIs vs advisors: in every project, there should be one DRI, and there can be any number of advisors. Advisors can give advice if they're asked, or proactively. The DRI gets to make the final decision, and the advisor can't demand "Why didn't you consult me?" or "Why didn't you take my advice after consulting me?" 100% of the responsibility and the authority rest with the DRI. This is good because it gives a feedback look to improve. I earlier ran a startup, and it failed. 100% of the responsibility was mine, which let me re-evaluate and change some things about how I work. If responsibility was diffuse, even well-intentioned people would find it hard to look back and identify what they can do better. Now I work as a consultant, and I don't take on a consulting gig unless I either have a DRI role or an advisor role. Could I do something differently?



Am I missing something? I'm happy to change my mind if so.

[Firerose]

I experience the No Authority Gauntlet Syndrome in my position and it is very frustrating.