The unfair disparity between accountability and empowerment
Understanding how badly designed organisations can destroy effectiveness and morale
The number one way to measure the quality of an organisation structure is to measure accountability and empowerment in its teams. Imagine a manager extremely empowered (e.g., because he’s related with the CEO or controls all the budget) to launch new ideas, burn money or change things but that later is not accountable for the success of any of those things. Image the oposite too, a manager accountable for the operation of a critical system but not for the resources to do so (very common in IT by the way).
Both are dysfunctional examples that happen every day in large organisations and are the result of bad managers and understanding of how their company works. They diminish not only the success of the company but build the frustration of talented individuals. For example, many large corporations have a clear separation between a “business” and a “technology” team, often creating a model where one “asks” for something and another “delivers”, leading to constant frustration and lack of recognition hidden to the outside.
You can even see this fracture inside one area, where one team “builds” something and another “maintains” it. Build teams tend to run fast, usually under pressure by commitments while maintenance teams will later have to cope with the lack of quality and shortcuts they took. See DevOps.
Because of this, many companies have started to experiment merging business and technology teams into “squads” or areas that own the whole problem instead of a function. This merger can be either virtual where teams sit together, report to the same manager or actually act as one. Although the first couple of moves improve the communication, leaving them separated, even if they report to the same person, doesn’t completely eliminate the problem.
“Those over there are my software engineers, I don’t really know what they do but they work for me”
After successfully piloting Agile and the idea of merging some teams together, Brian, the CEO of a large retailer in Europe, decided to roll-out the model to other areas of the company, including the points of sales (POS) in the stores. Traditionally led by a small “business” team that gathered, prioritised and sent requirements to IT, Brian felt that merging them with the corresponding technology team would eliminate the complains about time and cost he usually heard. He asked both the “business” responsible and the CIO to “do it”…
They met with the objective of defining which teams should be moved from IT and ensure they had all the levers (empowerment) to make POS operations a success. Before the meeting they agreed to come with a proposal, hopefully to ease such a hard conversation. The first chat was a surprise, the new “Head of POS” (fancy title by the way) only requested for 15 engineers while the CIO accounted for more than 200, how can the difference be so large? The mindset was the opposite the CIO anticipated, why instead of “stealing” a large amount of people and budget this guy only wanted 15?… ahhh
The Head of POS understood the POS as an application, with his old responsibility being to define nice user requirements in a computer screen for the store clerks to use, he didn’t account for everything that was behind, including the physical hardware, the contracts with companies that provided it, the 24/7 support to the stores, the credit card terminals, and much much more…
After weeks of discussions and frustration by the CEO it was agreed he was not the right person for the job. Accountability must match empowerment, one cannot be responsible, taking all the credit, reputation and empowerment without also taking ownership of the challenges and problem that role bring. The role “Product Owner” for example is often used for people that are really playing something closer to a “Project Manager”, a person driving a certain initiative but that will necessarily own the full scope of the problem, like its operation or success in the market.
If you own something you also wake up on a Saturday night to fix it
One reason why accountability and empowerment become distorted is the way managers design their organisations, often having to care for some people, something of a “personigram” where you have to ensure everyone has its own role and team. I have also seen managers argue that the size of teams reporting to each person should be the same like this is some sort of requirement, probably so they don’t complain and have similar relevance in the organisation.
In reality organisation follows strategy, one should know what you want to do, design the organisation that best fits that missions and THEN place the best people to do the job independently of their affiliations and politics. Only bad managers don’t do it this way.
If you cannot find a role for a person it means that person is not required
One can also “tweak” empowerment a few to achieve this balance. For example a CEO saying publicly that a project (or a person) is high priority goes a long way but this tools shouldn’t be use for everything, its the role of a good manager to design the organisation for smooth operation, with clear areas of responsibility, empowerment and no overlaps that fragment that responsibility when things go wrong.
“Every time that the CIO came to my meeting everyone else attended”