The Leadership Teams Series

When Responsibility Comes Without Authority

A leadership team agrees that someone will take responsibility for an important piece of work. The outcome is clear, the individual is capable and everyone understands what needs to be achieved.

Yet progress is slower than expected. Decisions keep returning to the leadership team, priorities compete and resources need approval. Other departments have different expectations, leaving the person responsible spending more time securing agreement than moving the work forward.

Eventually, questions begin to emerge about whether enough ownership is being taken.

It's an understandable frustration, but before concluding that someone needs to take greater responsibility, there's another question worth considering.

How much influence do they actually have over the outcome they're being held responsible for?

When responsibility and authority become disconnected

Leadership teams regularly allocate responsibility. It's an essential part of organising work, establishing expectations and creating accountability. But being responsible for an outcome doesn't necessarily mean having the authority to make the decisions needed to achieve it.

Consider a manager who is accountable for improving the performance of their department but has limited influence over staffing, priorities or the processes affecting delivery. Or a project lead who is responsible for a cross-functional initiative but cannot resolve competing demands between departments.

Both may be capable, committed and willing to take ownership. Yet their ability to deliver depends significantly on decisions controlled elsewhere.

When responsibility and authority become disconnected, accountability becomes more complicated. People may be judged against outcomes they have limited power to influence, while the additional effort involved in securing decisions and navigating competing expectations remains largely invisible.

From the leadership table, this can appear to be a problem with progress or individual ownership. Looking more closely may reveal something about how responsibility and authority have been distributed.

Where does authority really sit?

Most organisations have established reporting relationships and responsibilities, but these don't always reflect how decisions are made in practice.

Some decisions are formally delegated but routinely referred upwards. Others require agreement from several leaders, even though nobody has clearly established who has the final say. In founder-led businesses, authority may remain concentrated around the owner because that has historically been the quickest and most effective way to get things done.

These arrangements often develop for understandable reasons. They may have worked extremely well when the organisation was smaller, relationships were closer and decisions could be made through informal conversations.

As the organisation grows, however, the way responsibility is distributed can change more quickly than the way authority is exercised.

People take on broader roles, departments become more specialised and work increasingly depends on collaboration across functions. Yet important decisions may still return to the same few individuals, creating bottlenecks that become accepted as part of how the organisation operates.

The leadership team may then find itself dealing with repeated escalations, delayed progress and frustrated colleagues without recognising the connection to its own decision-making arrangements.

This is where the distinction between what has been formally agreed and what actually happens becomes particularly valuable.

Who is expected to take responsibility, who has the authority to act and where do decisions ultimately end up?

Authority, support and collective leadership

Of course, having authority doesn't mean someone should be expected to act alone. Effective leadership environments allow people to exercise judgement while drawing on the information, experience and support of others.

Consultation, collaboration and appropriate challenge all contribute to good decisions. The difficulty arises when people aren't clear whether they're seeking advice, gaining agreement or asking permission.

This distinction becomes especially important when responsibility extends across different functions. A leader may be accountable for delivering an organisational priority while depending on colleagues who have their own responsibilities and competing demands.

Without a shared understanding of how those decisions will be made, accountability can become fragmented. Each leader may be fulfilling their individual responsibilities while the collective outcome remains difficult to achieve.

For leadership teams, this raises a question about how they work together. Are they creating arrangements that enable shared priorities to progress, or are their individual areas of authority making collective responsibility harder to exercise?

It also invites reflection on the authority leaders choose to retain. As capabilities develop and organisational needs change, decisions that once required senior involvement may be better made elsewhere. Continuing to hold those decisions can create unnecessary dependency, even when the intention is to provide support or maintain standards.

Recognising this requires curiosity about established practices and a willingness to consider whether they still serve the organisation as intended.

Creating the conditions for meaningful accountability

Accountability is often discussed when something hasn't happened as expected. By that point, attention naturally turns towards who was responsible, what went wrong and what needs to change.

Those conversations matter, but they become more useful when leadership teams also examine the conditions in which responsibility was expected to be exercised.

Was the authority to act sufficiently clear? Could the person influence the decisions and resources that mattered? Were the expectations of different leaders aligned, and was appropriate support available when circumstances became difficult?

Exploring these questions doesn't remove personal responsibility. It helps establish whether people have been given a meaningful opportunity to fulfil it.

For a leadership team, this is an ongoing consideration rather than a one-off exercise. As the organisation develops, responsibilities change, people grow in capability and established decision-making arrangements may need to evolve.

The challenge is recognising when those arrangements have stopped supporting the outcomes the leadership team wants to achieve.

Where might your leadership team be expecting responsibility to be exercised while retaining the authority needed to fulfil it?

It's one of the areas explored in the Leadership Accountability Audit, part of the Strength In People Leadership Teams Playbook. The Audit invites leaders to reflect on how responsibility, authority and support work together within their collective leadership environment.

Accountability is influenced by the conditions in which people are expected to exercise it, and those conditions are shaped by the way we lead together.