Introduction

Many managers are quick to explain away their poor performance by asserting that they do not have enough authority to carry out their responsibilities. Our experience confirms that managers generally don't have enough authority to carry out their responsibilities, but they have to learn how to fulfill them anyway. On the other hand, many CEOs hesitate to delegate authority to subordinates because they don't appear ready. In the next few pages we will clarify these issues, discuss authority and responsibility, and why it is that the Chief Executive often believes he or she is the only one who cares or worries about the whole organization. We'll also discuss how to change things so the whole organization is well integrated and all parts are working together to help each other achieve the organization's mission.

The Relationship Between Responsibility and Authority

Conceive of the overall responsibility (Mission) of an organization as a large box. The definition of what is in the box and what is not, is the output from the organization's planning process. As the organization grows, this box quickly becomes too much for one individual to handle. Therefore, this large responsibility box is broken down into smaller responsibility boxes. You might think of these as the responsibilities for various departments in an organization. This process allows each department to specialize and focus on doing its responsibilities well, with the assumption being that if each department does its job the whole organization will automatically do well.

Let us assume that the organization assigns authority to each department so that the department has control over everything in its own box. Authority covers all the responsibilities and all is well... so far.

In reality, such a situation does not and cannot exist. Two practical factors undermine its simplicity: authority gaps and change.

Authority Gaps

First of all, the responsibilities of each box are interconnected to all other boxes. Only in a deep bureaucracy do you find a department in an organization that has no interconnections with other departments. In most organizations, the division of responsibilities is not a clean cut, but rather like pulling molasses apart. There are always interconnections.

By definition, lines of authority should not overlap. If they do, then two people have authority to hire or fire the same person or spend the same budget. In order to draw non-overlapping lines of authority a gap is left in some areas of responsibility. Authority gaps occur in what are often the more complex areas where separate responsibilities must be coordinated and linked together. These authority gaps are more commonly know as the cracks through which things fall.

The second factor that undermines the coincidence of authority and responsibility occurs over time as responsibilities evolve and change in response to external forces and internal adaptations. The neat, simple boxes change into amoebae-shaped responsibilities. At times the person defining the responsibility at the start does not fully realize the complexity of the true shape of the task.

The net result in a practical world is that responsibilities overlap and interconnect between departments yet the lines of authority do not overlap. As the tasks further change over time, the poor fit between authority and responsibility is further enlarged.

Thus, the areas of the organization controlled through an individual's authority are significantly less than the responsibilities that are needed for the organization to succeed. One solution is to regularly realign and update the circles of authority. Since the responsibilities may evolve and change on a weekly or monthly basis, it now becomes necessary to adjust the circles of authority to match the changed responsibilities on a weekly or monthly basis. Not only is this time consuming, it also is ineffective because successful restructuring requires that both the formal (strategy, structure and systems) and the informal (culture, history and personal relations) organization are restructured. It is extraordinarily rare for any organization to understand the technology, much less take the extensive time, to restructure the informal organization. As a result, most formal restructurings have marginal impact on the organization because the old structure continues to be maintained by the informal organization.

Because the responsibilities evolve and often expand outside the lines of authority, we end up with an organization where the lines of authority do not match the responsibilities and a fair number of things start falling into the gaps between departments and individuals. Since it is impractical and ineffective to restructure on a regular basis, most organizations arrive at another solution to this problem largely through default. The CEO takes responsibility for everything that falls through the cracks. In fact, it is the CEO who is the only person in the organization who has assumed responsibility for the sum total of all the organization's responsibilities.

In a young organization, as specialization occurs and responsibilities and authority are assigned out to individuals or departments, the individuals may remember to work together to achieve the overall responsibilities or purpose. However, as the organization grows there is a normal tendency for the separate responsibilities of departments and individuals to pull apart from one another, and lose sight of the fact that they must interact successfully together. This disintegration is one of the underlying dynamics of the aging process that affects all organizations.

The Strategic Job Description—SJD

Many organizations invest time and energy in clarifying the organization's overall responsibilities. This is typically called the organization's mission or purpose. Many CEOs and most mission consultants believe that this process will magically unite everyone as a team to achieve the organization's purpose. Indeed, the process of creating or clarifying an organization's purpose will engender a great deal of focus and harmony among those who participated in creating it.

Unfortunately, the benefits from this activity have a short half-life so that most of the benefits have disappeared three to four months after the organization's mission statement is completed. Of course, if the CEO was the only person involved in writing the mission, its ability to impact the various departments and individuals that work together in the organization is largely illusory.

Because of this short half-life and because no broad range, long-term planning has any real impact until it is converted into Monday morning actions, we created the concept of the Strategic Job Description. Its purpose is to create a structural glue which integrates the organization's separate departmental and individual responsibilities into a total team effort. Unless the CEO pushes this integration or "I" down, he or she will be the sole integrating force in the organization.

Your Strategic Job Description

Everyone in the organization has the same SJD. It includes three elements, listed in order of priority.

1. Your first priority—Is to achieve the organization's purpose. In other words, you in particular are responsible for everything.
2. Your second priority—Is to help others achieve the organization's purpose.
3. Your third priority—Is to carry out your job function.

If you have someone in your organization who believes that the first priority does not apply to him or her, you must ask the question about why he or she is on the payroll in the first place if they are not contributing to the organization's purpose.

What Are You Accountable For?

The SJD states that you are 100 percent accountable for the third priority, you are partially accountable for the second priority and you are even less accountable for the first priority. You are not fully accountable for 1 and 2 because you do not have authority in those areas. However, you share responsibity for those areas.

Your First Priority: What It Means to be Responsible for Everything

There are four different ways that you can take responsibility. For instance, when you walk into work and see a new problem sitting on your desk you could:

1. Fix it yourself.
2. Conclude that you need to get help in finding a good solution or in implementing the solution.
3. Conclude that you are not the best person to solve it or even be involved in solving it, even though you have taken responsibility for this problem. In this case you must see that it gets attention from others who then solve the problem.
4. Conclude that neither you nor any other individual you have contacted in the organization has an interest or commitment in solving the problem. In this case, it is your job to make sure that all of your peers agree to not pay any further attention to this problem.

In taking this approach we are trying to move away from the two most common ways that individuals handle responsibilities which do not clearly fall within their lines of authority. The first one is to ignore it: "that's not my problem." The next most common way is to complain about it and do nothing. Unfortunately, this often makes the complainer feel better by getting it off his or her chest, but it simultaneously reduces some of the motivation for change as a result.

Clarifying Everyone's Second Priority

Now that each department knows its second priority is helping other departments achieve the organization's purpose, it is possible to clarify the purpose of each department. Here are the steps:

1. Each department makes a list of other departments it thinks it should be helping or serving within the organization.

2. This information is shared, discussed, fine-tuned and eventually agreed upon by all the department heads.

3. Each department now makes a list of the needs of the other departments that it is helping or serving.

4. This list of needs is discussed, fine-tuned and eventually agreed upon by the department heads. It is important at this stage to be clear that if department A is being asked to help meet a particular need of department B, doing so will help department B support the overall purpose of the organization, or support another department in its support of the overall purpose of the organization.

5. As each department's needs from the other departments are clarified, it may be necessary to discuss priorities and resources unless all of the needs can be met with ease. If the needs from all of the other departments cannot be met by a particular department, two options are available:

7. Ask that department what it will take to meet all of the needs of all of the other departments, and then decide if the organization can provide "what it will take."

8. Set priorities among all the needs and decide which ones will not be met. It is important that this is done in a team setting with full discussion so that everyone is in agreement about what needs are going to be met, and what needs will not be met. This must be done to avoid continuous complaining about lack of needs being met.

When the needs for each department are agreed upon they are then rated. Each department now gives a list of the needs it has agreed to meet for each department it is serving. It then asks each department to rate how well those needs have been met in the past. A simple zero to ten rating is adequate in most cases with ten being high. A ten signifies that the department is totally satisfied with the service it has been getting over the last three to six months. It is valuable to involve the direct recipients of the service in the rating process. In other words, if the department head is not the direct recipient of the service, it is inappropriate for him or her to do the rating. In all cases where the numerical score is below eight it will be very helpful if the department doing the rating clearly specifies what it will take in order to receive a ten and/or what is being done or not done now that causes the low score.
This data now provides specific input for each department on areas where it should work to improve meeting internal customers' needs. It may turn out that additional resources and/or re negotiation of priorities is needed if dramatic changes in the level of needs are desired.

Aligning the Accountability System

The final step in this process is critical in order to energize the actual changes that have been outlined so far. A quarterly review session should be held in which each element of the SJD is evaluated. You can evaluate the first priority of achieving the organization's purpose by reviewing whether the organization achieved its planned goals and improvements during the quarter. This implies that the organization's purpose has been converted into specific and measurable quarterly milestones and targets.

The second priority in the SJD can be assessed by each department sending out a list of the needs it agreed to meet for each other department and have the other departments give them a zero to ten rating for the past three months.

The third element in the SJD is evaluated by comparing how well each department performed based on its planned departmental milestones and targets for that quarter.

This whole review process can be completed in four to eight hours including an action plan on what each department will do over the next quarter in order to correct any deficiencies between planned and actual in the first quarter. Most organizations will require an outside facilitator skilled in this process in order to make it efficient and effective. After several quarters of practice, the organization should be able to conduct these sessions on its own. (See Management Briefing "How To Turn Your Monthly Management Meeting Into a Review and Action Planning—RAP—Session").

The input from each of these quarterly sessions can now be used to allocate incentives to each department. These incentives can then be further allocated to individuals within that department.

Individualizing the Strategic Job Description

The preceding discussions have focused on the strategic interaction between departments. It is also possible to apply the same process to the individuals within any department. In most cases, however, it is useful to make progress on the relationship between departments before working on the relationships between individuals within departments. The only major exception would be in an organization where the departments have very little significant interaction. In this case, you would first focus on Strategic Job Descriptions at the individual level within a department.

Practical Considerations When Using the Strategic Job Description

It is important to remember that the purpose of a Strategic Job Description is to move each individual and each department away from overly focusing on their work and forgetting to help others to achieve the organization's purpose. Implementing Strategic Job Descriptions will often create other problems that now need to be solved.

For example, an individual is likely to be faced with a choice of meeting one need or another, and does not have the time or resources to meet both. It is now essential for the organization to begin a problem solving effort that focuses on priorities and resources.

Thus, when an individual faces too many demands, those involved should sit down and ask questions along the following line:

• Are all the requests necessary?
• Do they all support the organization's purpose?
• Is there any other way to fulfill the requests?
• If we cannot reduce the work load, is it possible to smooth out the peaks and valleys in the workload by better setting the priorities and due dates?
• If all the work is necessary, and the peaks and valleys are as smooth as they can become and you still have not eliminated the problem, you may then have to choose between hiring more support, institutionalizing overtime, subcontracting some of the work out, or reducing the quality of the work.

Such discussions should go on in order to make significant improvements on how work is done in your organization. Initially, such discussions should include all the key people involved from each department, and the CEO. The chief executive's job is to make sure that the department head's questions are answered and the problem is resolved in a way that best supports the purpose of the organization. Once the CEO has confidence that his or her managers and employees can settle such issues with a correct focus and criteria it is no longer necessary for him or her to participate.

Delegating "I"

Ichak Adizes, in How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis, has reduced all of the necessary functions in a healthy organization into four broad roles.
P: The Producing results role focuses on doing things.
A: The Administering role focuses on running the systems that do things.
E: The Entrepreneuring role focuses on designing the systems and adapting to changes in the organization's environment.
I: The Integrating role focuses on connecting all parts of the organization together into a functioning whole.

Almost all traditional approaches to delegation focus on delegating P and A. In other words, we delegate the doing and the running of the systems. It is much less common to see E delegated, which of course means delegating or letting go of the decisions on when and how to redesign the systems in an organization. The failure to delegate E forces most organizations to age because as they increase in size and complexity their ability to create and adapt is diluted dramatically.

Once the delegating of E is begun it will increase the disharmony between departments in an organization since each department now is likely to move in new and different directions. Thus, it is necessary to simultaneously begin the delegation of I to integrate and connect the normal responsibilities with their proactive changes due to "E"ing. It is the delegation of I which is outlined in this paper. Failure to delegate I will put a lid on the delegation of E. Since many CEOs do not have the time to be in all places at once they cannot integrate all of the potential E in the organization. When the E gets out of hand, the CEO quite naturally puts the lid back on and says "enough."

Even for the organization that has not made a conscious effort to delegate E, the delegation of I is a practical and effective way of increasing everyone's responsibility for the total organization. The use of the Strategic Job Description and the Internal Departmental Missions are very practical ways of making each element of the organization aware of how it interconnects and must continue to interconnect and coordinate with all other relevant elements in the organization.

Many CEOs end up being the only one who thinks creatively about the organization, and the only person who worries about the overall organization. This occurs naturally and normally because all of the ways that we design our organizations are focused on the P and the A elements; so that is exactly what we get: P and A. It is rare to find an organization that also includes design elements that foster E and I. If you apply the technologies outlined in this management briefing it will take you a good part of the way towards designing I into your organization.

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For additional insights into 'responsibility' see the author's book Responsible Managers Get Results.