How to Handle Responsibility without Authority at Work
To handle responsibility without authority, find out which decisions and resources each outcome you answer for depends on, and who holds each one. Ask to have specific decisions moved to your role. Build influence with the managers and teams who hold the rest, and put deadlines, tradeoffs and decisions in writing with the people who own them.
You answer for an outcome, such as a launch date, a system migration or a process a whole department has to start using. The people doing the work report to other managers, and the decisions that shape the result, such as scope, budget and who works on what, belong to other people. When the result is late, you're asked to explain it.
What Does Responsibility without Authority Mean at Work?
Responsibility without authority is being answerable for an outcome when you don't control the decisions, people or money the outcome depends on. It's also called accountability without authority. People in these roles describe it as having all the responsibility and none of the authority.
Authority over a piece of work can cover three kinds of control.
Decisions about the work. Scope, the order of tasks, dates and the technical approach.
People's time. Who works on the project, how many hours they give it, and what they do first.
Money and other resources. Budget, tools and outside help.
A role can hold some of these and not others. A project manager might set the order of tasks and have no part in deciding who's assigned to the project.
Why Do Organizations Give People Responsibility without Authority?
Research on how organizations are designed gives one explanation. Jay Galbraith described an organization that divides its work among specialist groups and then has to fit their pieces together to complete the whole task (Galbraith, 1974, Interfaces). The more uncertain the task, the more information decision makers have to process while the work is under way. Rules and plans cover the situations that can be predicted, and situations they don't cover go up the management hierarchy. As uncertainty grows, so does the number of those situations, until the managers above can't handle them all.
One of the responses Galbraith described is decision making that crosses the lines of authority, which moves decisions down to the people who have the information. It starts with managers who share a problem talking to each other directly. As contacts and problems across departments grow, organizations add liaison roles, task forces and permanent teams. Then they create roles whose job is to coordinate the work across departments, with titles such as product manager, program manager and project manager. Galbraith wrote that these roles have power even when no one reports directly to them.
As tasks become more uncertain, he wrote, the role also needs some formal authority. His last step is a matrix, where some people report to two managers.
Where Does Your Influence Come from When No One Reports to You?
Galbraith named sources of influence a coordinating role has without anyone reporting to it. In his description, the person in the role reports to the general manager. They collect information, which evens out differences in power between groups that come from some having better access to knowledge and information. When they have technical competence and don't favor any group, they also have influence from their expertise. He wrote that evening out those differences raises trust and the quality of the decisions the groups make together, and that it happens only when the person in the role uses their expertise through persuasion and informal influence.
Ralph Katz and Thomas Allen studied research and development project teams in ten organizations, focusing on engineers who reported to both a project manager and a functional manager, the manager of their technical department (Katz and Allen, 1981, MIT Sloan School of Management working paper). Managers above the projects rated each project's performance. Projects were rated higher when the engineers saw the project manager as more influential in the wider organization than the functional manager. The engineers also rated those project managers above their functional managers for useful contacts inside and outside the organization, getting resources, and resolving conflicts between groups. The study compared ratings across projects, so it shows what went together.
In your own work, learn enough about each team's tasks to judge a tradeoff between two of them. Pass what you hear from one group to the others who need it. Get to know the people who approve budgets and staff for your project's work before you need something from them. When two groups disagree, write down both positions and take them to the person who can decide.
To get help from a person who doesn't report to you, offer them something they value and ask how they'd do their part, two of the steps in leading without authority at work.
How Do You Work Out What You Control and What You Don't?
If you're responsible for the outcome of a project without authority over the people on it, write down what the outcome depends on and who holds each piece.
List each outcome you answer for, with the measure and the date your manager will use to judge it.
Under each outcome, list the decisions it depends on, such as scope, the order of the work, dates, the technical approach and who's assigned.
List the resources it needs, such as people's hours, budget and tools.
Next to each decision and resource, write who holds it now and how long the last decision or request of that kind took.
Mark each decision as one you make, one you recommend and someone else makes, or one someone else makes without you.
Show the list to your manager and ask them to correct any holder you've guessed.
If your project uses a RACI chart, compare it with your list. A chart can name a person as accountable for a task while someone else controls the hours or budget the task needs, and then it doesn't show who can move the task forward. Look for that first when a RACI chart isn't working.
Which Parts of the Gap between Responsibility and Authority Can You Change?
Galbraith listed the steps that add formal authority to a coordinating role, in this order.
The person in the role approves the budgets the departments draw up for the work.
Planning and budgeting for the work start with the person in the role.
The person in the role receives the budget and pays the departments for the people and resources they provide.
From your list, pick the decisions someone else makes that have delayed the work longest. For each one, choose the change to ask for.
Move the decision to you, within limits. For example, you approve scope changes that don't move the date or add cost.
Bring you in before the decision. You recommend, and the holder decides.
Set a time limit. The holder agrees to decide within a set number of days of your request.
Ask to take part in planning and budgeting for the work you'll answer for, from the start of the cycle.
Katz and Allen wrote that project performance would be higher if project managers accepted more influence over the technical details of the work from the functional managers whose engineers were on the project. For decisions about those details, ask the managers of the people doing the work what they recommend before you decide.
How Do You Ask Your Manager for Authority over Specific Decisions?
Ask for one decision at a time, and tie it to the outcome you answer for. A general request for more authority doesn't name a decision your manager can hand over.
Bring your list. Say which decision delayed the work, for how long, and what the delay cost, such as a missed date or work that had to be redone. Then name the change you want and its limits. For example, "The vendor launch moved twice while scope changes waited for approval. Can I approve changes that don't move the date or add cost, and bring the rest to you?"
If your manager agrees, ask them to tell the teams involved in writing which decisions are now yours, so people bring those decisions to you. If they say no, ask who holds the decision and how many days that person needs to decide, and build that time into your plan.
What Does It Cost to Escalate a Decision You Don't Hold?
Escalation uses the time of someone with authority over the person who holds the decision, and the colleague whose decision you raise will know you raised it. Use your list to find who that senior person is, such as the holder's manager or the person who sets priorities for both teams.
Before you escalate a problem at work, make one specific request to the holder with the date you need the decision by. To escalate without harming working relationships, keep the message about the work that's waiting and the decision it needs.
When the same kind of decision keeps needing escalation, take it to your manager as one to move to your role or to give a time limit.
How Do You Hold People Accountable When They Don't Report to You?
Find out who reviews the work of each person on your project, and agree on the work with that manager as well as with the person.
Ask the manager to agree to the hours and dates the work needs, and to include the work in the person's goals for the period.
Ask whether you can give input to the person's review, and tell the person you've asked.
When the person does good work on your project, send their manager a short note saying what they did and what it made possible.
In most of the projects Katz and Allen studied, engineers saw their functional manager as having more influence over their salaries and promotions than their project manager. The authors wrote that engineers' efforts and attitudes are very sensitive to who they think controls their rewards. They noted that project managers may have been consulted on pay and promotion without the engineers knowing.
With the person, write down who does what by when and in what order, as you would when you lead a project without authority. When someone misses an agreed date, ask what's in the way and agree on a new one. If the new date passes too, escalate the teammate who isn't delivering to their manager, and refer to the hours and dates the manager agreed to.
To manage stakeholders with competing priorities, find out what your request is competing with in each person's week, and ask their manager which comes first when it doesn't fit.
What Do You Do When You're Held to a Deadline You Didn't Set?
Find out where the date came from before you plan around it. Ask the person who gave it to you these questions.
Who set the date, and when?
What is it tied to, such as a customer contract, a board meeting, the end of a budget year or another team's launch?
What happens if it's missed, and who would have to agree to move it?
What plan or estimate was it based on?
If the date came from a forecast, compare it with past work. Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo wrote that decision makers tend to treat each problem as unique and to neglect the statistics of the past when they evaluate current plans (Kahneman and Lovallo, 1993, Management Science). They traced overly optimistic forecasts to an inside view of the problem, which bases predictions on plans and scenarios. Find two or three finished projects in your organization that were like this one, note how long each took, and put those durations next to the date you were given.
What Can You Change When the Deadline Can't Move?
When the date is fixed, the scope, the order of the work, who works on it, the budget and the quality checks are the parts left to change. Each change costs something.
Write two or three options, each with what it costs. A team facing a fixed launch date might write these.
Launch on the date with the core features, and add reporting six weeks later.
Launch on the date with everything, and move two engineers from another project for a month, which moves that project's date.
Launch on the date with everything and one round of testing, and accept a higher risk of defects after launch.
Send the options to the person who owns the date with your recommendation, and ask them to choose by a set day. If the date came from someone senior to your manager, send it through your manager. Put what you can deliver by the date in the first sentence of the message.
How Do You Stay Accountable for Decisions You Don't Control?
Keep a written record of each decision the outcome depends on, with the date, what was decided, who decided it, the options considered, and any risk you raised beforehand with the date you raised it. Keep it where everyone on the project can read it. Send a short summary to the people affected on the day of the decision, and ask them to reply if anything in it is wrong.
When you're asked to explain a result, start from the record. Say what was decided, by whom and when, what you raised beforehand, and what you'd do differently.
When a project ends, add how long the work took and what delayed it. Those durations are the past work to compare the next deadline with.
Where Do You Start with Responsibility without Authority?
This week, take the outcome you're asked about most often. Write down the decisions and resources it depends on, who holds each one, and which ones you make, recommend or don't take part in. Then take the list to your manager and ask for one specific decision to be moved to you or given a time limit.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is the Difference between Responsibility and Accountability at Work?
Responsibility is the work you're expected to do or see done. Accountability is being the one asked to explain the result. In a role that coordinates work across teams, you can have both for an outcome and hold only some of the decisions behind it. Keep a dated record of who made each decision, so your explanation of the result is accurate.
Should You Ask for Formal Authority over the People on Your Project?
Ask for authority over specific decisions and resources, such as approving scope changes within the budget, and for input into the reviews of the people on your project. In most of the projects Katz and Allen studied, engineers saw their functional manager as having more influence over pay and promotion. The authors wrote that engineers' efforts and attitudes are very sensitive to who they think controls their rewards.
Is Responsibility without Authority a Sign of a Badly Run Company?
Not by itself. Galbraith described roles that coordinate work across departments with no one reporting to them as one of the ways organizations handle uncertain work. Ask your manager who holds each decision your outcome needs. If they name the holders and agree on dates for the decisions, plan around those dates. If they can't name a holder, ask them to make that decision themselves.
How Do You Measure Your Own Performance When Other People Do the Work?
Measure what you control, and agree on the measures with your manager. Examples include how many days each decision waited between your request and the holder's answer, how early you raised each risk, whether the people affected heard about each decision the day it was made, and whether you met the dates you set for your own work.
What Do You Do after a Deadline You Didn't Set Is Missed?
Start from your record of decisions. Send the person who owns the date what was decided and when, the risks raised and when, and how long the work took. Propose a new date based on how long this project and similar past projects took. Kahneman and Lovallo traced overly optimistic forecasts to predictions based on plans and scenarios.
If you're moving work forward with people who don't report to you, Get the Buy-In walks you through who needs to say yes, in what order, and what each person needs to hear.
Related Blog Posts:
How to Lead without Authority at Work
How to Lead a Project without Authority
When Should I Escalate a Problem at Work?
References
Galbraith, J. R. (1974). Organization design: An information processing view. Interfaces, 4(3), 28-36. https://doi.org/10.1287/inte.4.3.28
Katz, R., & Allen, T. J. (1981). Project performance and the locus of influence in the R&D matrix (Working Paper No. 1233-81). Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/48815
Kahneman, D., & Lovallo, D. (1993). Timid choices and bold forecasts: A cognitive perspective on risk taking. Management Science, 39(1), 17-31. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.39.1.17
