“Help! I have all this responsibility and no authority to get it done!”
OK, I’ll help: authority is designed to formalize and strengthen your ability to influence others, not to replace it. If there is something you need done and you can’t figure out how to do it by influence, then having authority won’t help. In fact, here’s what’d happen if you had sufficient authority right now to push your agenda through:
You’d call up whoever it is whose help you needed, and you’d ask for help.
They’d say, “No.”
You’d pull rank and tell them they have no choice.
They’d tell you to go stick it.
Or, after you pull rank and tell them they have no choice, they say, “OK, whatever you say.” And fail to deliver, just to spite you.
Now whatcha gonna do? Tell your boss that you got had by an employee? That you didn’t see it coming? That you were perfect and it was your dang employee who dropped the ball? Because now that you have authority, ultimately your failure to deliver is due to one of only two things: your inability to prioritize activities or your inability to manage people.
Yikes.
OK, so suddenly, influence is starting to look better. That means you need a model for influencing others, so you’re in luck: there are lots of them. Here’s one:
Influence can happen through one of three ways:
- Power: think might, brute strength, political clout. Pros: fast, expedient, and you WIN. Cons: you develop enemies, create animosity and resentment, and because power erodes with use, every time you use your power, you weaken yourself relative to those around you. (Think of military power: once a bomb is dropped, it is gone until it is replaced; once a division is mobilized, it is no longer available to commit elsewhere; similarly, once a political favor is called in, it’s been called in, and needs to be replaced.)
- Rights: think formal authority, contracts, mediation… basically, anytime a third party or outside, objective standard is used to determine an outcome. Pros: objective (perceived as fair). Cons: slow, not so objective (how impartial do you think you’d feel after losing a court case?), indistinguishable from power under certain circumstances, introduces 3rd parties (with their own interests, interpretations, and perceptions) into the mix.
- Interests: think influence, trade-offs, win-win negotiations (the real kind, not the coersive, “power dressed up as a fake win-win“ kind). Pros: lasting outcomes, don’t need formal authority, long term relationship is preserved. Cons: can be slow, require both parties to be invested in the relationship, can create future vulnerabilities, not always perceived as fair in the moment
We often hear about influence, power, interests, authority, and win-win or win-lose scenarios, but we don’t often hear about them in context. Hopefully, this context helps bring just a bit of visibility to why formal authority is so alluring and the real costs of using it, vis-a-vis a softer, more influence-based approach.
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Oh Jason, get your head out of the sand. Authority and Accountability not an issue. For goodness sake I can’t think of a bigger issue in business today. When I evaluate organizations I ALWAYS (remember we were taught NOT to use that word ALWAYS but here it is just the same) find a disassociation, with the understanding of the words; Accountability and Authority, with the organizations roles and responsibilities. ONCE they clarify their misunderstanding it becomes blatently obvious to them that they never understood the words in the beginning.
It was my learning through the Milgram experiments that made this such a big issue for me. Have you not ever asked yourself “Why in Gods name did the German people go along with Hitler in the first place?” and find that HE must have had some Powerful AUTHORITY over them but they didn’t feel accountable for the millions of Jews killed until after the war and they had seen what was done?
Of course you have and so have millions others. You see Jason, life like business isn’t just rules and the boss thinking that he is so superior that his only method of getting results from the workforce is CARROT or STICK (Punishment-Reward). How foolish of anyone to think we are that much smarter than anyone else. Yes I agree with your thought, an influenced based approach is best, but Jason ol Bean you forget that most all of us humans want to do good work. We want to achieve and be successful but the first steps to do so are in the understanding of SYSTEMS and PROCESSES to achieve a Positive and acceptable Behavior change. Threats nor intimidation nor bribes, will ever achieve accepted behavior change, those only get “malicious compliance” and create YES MEN of us all.
Having a observant organization of both systems and process changes within those systems to then work toward greater ounderstanding with all in the business will result in Proper behavior and a functioning organization. I learned that from GOD Jason, he gave us all a vessel of work called the human body with Systems that function together unless something goes astray then we have to change our process within the system to make it better. Then we must allow for our behavior change to come about to function with those newly formed process changes. I pray you don’t ever get diabetes Jason, but if you do that blood system malfunction and the process changes that one goes through WILL change a persons behavior, believe me.