Responsibility Beyond Your Authority
When you have responsibility for something, it means that you have all of the authority you need to create an outcome for yourself or for your team. You have access to the tools, resources, people, expertise, etc. that you need to get whatever the job is — done.
If you find yourself in a situation where you don’t have the authority or access to the tools that you need, you cannot be expected, nor should you attempt to be responsible for this particular thing.
This often shows up with Product Owners in an Agile System, but can actually occur anywhere in an organization, between teams, leaders, Business and IT (common!), and even in families and government structures. Check out the push and pull between States and the Federal Government right now and you’ll see a prime example of this at work!
What happens to you when you try to be overly responsible?
When you try to BE responsible beyond your authority, you are probably putting pressure on yourself to create an outcome that you ultimately can’t control. As a result, you are spending time — often lots of it — chasing people, teams, and those who HAVE the authority, tools, resources, people, expertise, etc and digging into their sandbox asking them what they are doing and how they are doing it. Meanwhile, the things that you are responsible for still need to get done.
The result is that you end up working really long hours and really hard to make sure all of the things that you aren’t responsible for are getting done to your satisfaction. You’re also spending time making sure you do your own job. Meanwhile, you’re burnt out, and the job that you actually are responsible for isn’t getting done well. Balls are probably being dropped.
What is happening to the teams or people where the responsibility and authority actually belongs?
They feel untrusted, incapable, and they lose confidence in themselves.
They may also become resistant and defiant to your questioning. This may mean they start hiding more and more from you so that you no longer have visibility into what is going on with the team. Who has parented a teenager? This happens in a parent/teen relationship frequently!
Again, your response will probably be suspicion, which will lead you to want to dig in further and more frequently. You’ll want to know more and more and more, until the team is bogged down in telling you what they are doing along with why and how. Their ability to create the outcome that you want becomes nearly impossible because they don’t have the time to do their job — their job ends up being consumed by telling you about what they are doing rather than getting the work done.
What happens to your perception of them?
You start to believe they are disengaged and don’t care.
They give up trying to do it on their own because they either have come to believe that they can’t because they have lost confidence in themselves OR they’ve come to believe that if they do they will be questioned or punished somehow if they make a mistake.
This creates a vicious downward spiral that continues to degrade. Not only does their productivity tank, so does their confidence, their engagement, their feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction in the work they are doing, and their willingness to take risks and fail. (A staple for a resilient and innovative system)
Bottom line, trying to be responsible as a Product Owner for what the team is responsible & has the authority for will:
- Increase your own workload
- Increase their workload
- Reduce their ability to be productive
- Reduce your effectiveness in doing the job that is yours
- Decrease your confidence in them
- Decrease their confidence in themselves
- Reduce their engagement
- Reduce transparency and create defiant resistance
- Continue to devolve
AND THEN:
- People will leave
- You’ll contemplate leaving
- Projects will get delayed
- Bonuses will get rejected
- ETC.
