Authority has edges. Responsibility does not.
A general contractor on a commercial build in Boise carries responsibility for the safety record of every subcontractor on that site. He does not hire their people, does not train them, cannot discipline them, and in most cases will never learn their names. If a framing crew employed by someone else takes a shortcut on a Thursday afternoon, the consequences arrive at his door: the citation, the insurance, the reputation, the phone call to a family. His authority over that crew is close to nothing. His responsibility for them is complete.
This is not an unusual arrangement or a badly drawn contract. It is the ordinary structure of every position of consequence, and the gap widens as you go up.
Two ways of trying to close the gap
Most leaders discover the asymmetry somewhere in their first serious role and experience it as a mistake. Something has gone wrong with the design. They then attempt one of two corrections, and the attempt itself is the characteristic failure of the middle of a career.
The first correction is to expand control until it matches responsibility. If you will answer for it, you will decide it. Approvals migrate upward. The leader begins reviewing work that had been settled two levels below, sits in meetings that do not require them, and asks to see things before they go out. Every individual instance is defensible. The aggregate is an organization in which nothing moves without one person, that person is now the constraint on everything, and the people below them have stopped exercising the judgment that would have made the control unnecessary. The gap has not closed. It has been converted into a bottleneck, and the leader is now responsible for more outcomes than before while having less time to attend to any of them.
The second correction runs the other direction: shrink responsibility until it matches control. This is the origin of a great deal of defensive documentation. Emails written for the file rather than the recipient. Careful establishment, in advance, of whose decision something was. A culture in which everyone can demonstrate that the failure occurred outside their boundary. Organizations that go far down this road stop being able to do anything that requires someone to accept an outcome they cannot guarantee, which is to say they stop being able to do anything difficult.
Both corrections are rational responses to genuine discomfort. Both cost the organization more than the discomfort did.
The instruments that are actually available
If the gap cannot be closed, it has to be managed with something other than control. Four instruments do most of the work, and none of them operate on the decision itself.
Selection. Who is in the role is the highest-leverage decision available to someone who cannot supervise the work. The contractor’s real safety instrument is which subcontractors he is willing to bid with. This is slow, it is often the only thing that matters, and it is routinely traded away for price.
Standards. Not rules covering every case, which cannot be written, but a small number of conditions that are never negotiable and are known to be never negotiable. Standards work where supervision cannot reach because they operate when you are not there, which is nearly always.
Information flow. The gap between authority and responsibility is survivable in proportion to how early you hear things. A leader who learns about the problem in week one has options that a leader who learns in week six does not, and the difference is not luck. It is the accumulated result of how previous bad news was received.
Answering for it. The last instrument is the one that looks least like a tool. When the outcome arrives and it is bad and you did not cause it, you answer for it anyway, in public, without distributing the blame accurately.
What answering for it actually means
The distinction that matters is between the external account and the internal one, and it is not hypocrisy.
Externally, to the client, the board, the regulator, the newspaper, the answer is that it happened on your watch and you own it. No portion of the explanation identifies the person responsible. Internally, in private, the correction is exact, unsentimental, and directed at whoever actually needs it, and it may end that person’s employment.
Leaders who cannot do the first part will find that people stop taking risks in front of them, since the cost of a bad outcome is public exposure. Leaders who do the first part but not the second are not being generous. They are avoiding a conversation, and the organization learns that failures have no consequence, which is a more expensive lesson than the original failure.
The other direction
The asymmetry is not purely a burden, and pretending otherwise produces a self-pity that people around a leader find tiresome.
It runs in both directions. Leaders receive credit for successes they did not personally produce, on the same principle and by the same mechanism. The organization performs, and the person at the top is treated as the cause of it, frequently on thin evidence. Anyone who accepts that arrangement in good years has already accepted the structure that hands them the bad ones. The asymmetry is not unfair. It is the price of a position that also collects returns it did not fully earn.
The actual test
Whether someone can hold a senior role comes down to whether they can sit inside the gap without trying to close it.
Not comfortably. Comfort is not on offer, and the leaders who appear comfortable have usually closed the gap in one of the two damaging directions and stopped noticing. The requirement is narrower: to remain accountable for things you cannot control, to resist the pull toward either more control or less accountability, and to keep operating the instruments that work indirectly and slowly. Most people who struggle at the next level up are not failing at the work. They are failing to tolerate the gap, and the tolerance is the qualification.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD