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Responsibility without authority makes employees disgruntled

This could be the story of a year or so I spent on another team at my company. I joined a team as what I thought was supposed to be a junior member of the team and was (without any input from me) turned into a stange kind of sub-manager. I had no budget, no authority, my manager wouldn't back me up with anyone (on or off our team), and yet I had full responsibility for a very public element of our IT infrastructure. Despite all this, I got the job done, and I maintained some semblance of professionalism (though I was not, of course, at my "sunny best" doing it) and our internal customers were very happy, to boot. As soon as I could I high-tailed it out of there to another department, but not before I got reviewed (in part by the manager listed above). I was particularly amused by the part where I was "incapable of working outside the chain of command" - since I didn't *exist* on the chain of command, that was a logical impossibility.

Whew. Glad to read all I had was a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation.

Folks, this is serious. If you wouldn't want the job, how can you ask someone else to do it? If your best people (and they are the ones who usually end up in this kind of situation) say you're not giving them what they need to do their job (or else you're giving them more than they can handle with any level of help) who are you to argue? The reason you want them to do the work is because you trust them to get it done, isn't it? Well, why don't you trust their judgement about what they need to follow through?

Of course, the very people who need to read this won't. Oh, well.

The reality is that few or none have the authority equal to their responsibility. This is where communication and leadership come into play.

A task is not an all or nothing proposition to accept or "push back." When given a task, one must evaluate the various constraints and come up with a set of various alternatives to meet the different aspects of the task in varying degrees. Then it's sales time. Present the alternatives to the interested parties; tell them this is what you want and here is what we can do and what it will cost.

The authority to accept or reject a task is a myth. Work with people to define the problem and an acceptable solution. That is the ture way to meet your responsibilities.

Shelley, this article could just as easily--and possibly, more reasonably--be at home at TechRepublic IT Manager.

This subject goes far beyond the realm of "builder" and could be generalized to just about anyone working in IT. Wayne's comments regarding degree of responsibility versus degree of authority is right on target. No matter how much of each you have, you very rarely have "enough" authority. Good communication, the ability to "bargain", and a supportive boss go a long way toward compensating for a shortfall in authority.

Wayne and Silverback are probably working in resilient style organizations.

Those of us that understand Shelley's article probably work in passive agressive style organizations.

"It?s a place where more energy
is put into thwarting things
than starting them, but in the
nicest way."

Google: The Passive-Aggressive
Organization
by Gary L. Neilson, Bruce A. Pasternack,
and Karen E. Van Nuys

You can communicate all you want under the passive agressive system and then you write an article like Shelley's.

http://custom.hbsp.com/b01/en/implicit/custom.jhtml?pr=BAHAMR0510E2005092707