Accountability & Authority

Last week's missive on bureaucracy and its antidote of Accountability—the act of holding someone to account for how well or not well they had performed—brought many reactions and great responses.

To quote one of my great mentors, Michael Anderson, "things without consequences are of no consequence." That is true of both positive and negative consequences equally. If you don't catch someone doing something right, there will be no consequence to someone, and their efforts will be meaningless.

A topic that has received less attention in our recent missives is the concept of Authority. We define Authority as legitimate(d) power, and a key aspect of this is the ability to make decisions.

As a leader, you may choose to set boundaries on your team's decisions, and this is a matter of your judgement and discretion. However, the one constant rule is the need for clarity. People are not mind readers; they need a clear understanding of your intentions.

Regarding Authority, there is an adage that is important to remember: Accountability without Authority is unfair. If you clearly grant the Authority to do assigned work, and apply consequences based on this, you have energized your people.

By the same token though, Authority without Accountability is dangerous. If people are free to do whatever they want without consequences, then you have set a dangerous precedent. Bureaucracies often fall victim to people acting without constraints.

Authority is a very powerful tool. In clarifying work for our clients, we find that people have a general sense of what they are expected to deliver – what they are unclear on is their commensurate Authority.

Authority represents our power, and we humans often crave power and control over our work and our environment. When we don't clarify Authority, people will try to seize control. This is not to suggest that it is necessarily nefarious; it is merely us exercising our sense of Responsibility for what we think is necessary, often seen in the light of what we see as the greater good.

This can also tempt people to throw up their hands and declare that their work cannot be done since they do not have the power to make things happen. This breeds disengagement and ineffectiveness.

Clarifying Authority can seem, on the outset, like much ado about nothing. Clarifying Authority is key to directing energy and, therefore, productivity. When it is unclear, we may wait and not make decisions or overstep our bounds, which then leads to stepping on others' toes. In these cases, it leads to rework or even conflict and mistrust.? ?

I often hear clients suggesting, "we use the RACI model." In these cases, it doesn't really represent Authority. Determining who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed is great for defining who is involved in a project, but it doesn't get to the nub of Authority.

Defining Authority is about clarifying who can help me, who has a say over my work, and who can direct my energies. In turn, it also defines who I have control over to fulfill my accountabilities.

What supercharges those Authorities is that a Manager holds someone accountable for delivering things to me or ensuring that they will respond accordingly if I have Authority over their work. Therefore, the act of being held to account is intertwined with Authority. A simple example is, if I am to get service from someone in another team or department, there is someone there to hold the responder to account for delivering it. I am not really controlling them, for their manager is holding them to account for delivering it.

This is important, especially in the face of anaklesis , where I don't want to damage the relationship. In the Accountability model, they aren't doing me a favour; we are both working to deliver on the organization's Strategy. I don't have to screw up my courage to ask for the service. They know they have to provide it; if they can't, that is a matter of conflicting priorities, such as when two tasks have the same deadline or when a task conflicts with a team's overall goals. In the case of conflicting priorities, we need to escalate to our manager for resolution and not wait in silence, hoping that things will somehow change. Timely escalation in these circumstances becomes critical to productivity.

It is difficult to cover all the various aspects of Accountability, Authority, and escalation in this short missive, but hopefully, I have given you a brief sense of how it works and, more importantly, why it helps increase productivity. ?