Day 101: Balance...

I suppose I can be pretty opinionated about a number of things but I think if there was one soap-box topic that gets me going like a Bible thumping Baptist it would be the disconnect between responsibility and authority. The reason I say “disconnect” is that responsibility and authority cannot stand alone. You can’t have one without the other. I think the fundamental problem in our relationships, our work and our great country is that we, collectively, have failed to connect the two.

It’s a very simple equation. If you’re given a responsibility then you are entitled to the authority to manage that responsibility. And authority includes the willingness to accept the results of actions taken. The balance between the two gets out of whack when you have more of one than the other. Responsibility without authority will fail just as easily as authority without responsibility. I think most of us suffer from the former. In our professional lives we get saddled with a lot of responsibility from our management but rarely given the resources to effectively get the job done. It’s a recipe for failure and our companies are full of Paula Deans

Nowadays people complain a lot about big government yet we’re the ones that created it by constantly looking for handouts. Remember, the implementation of responsibility and authority is a two way street. When we expect the federal government to bail us out of a problem, we assume authority to demand help from the feds thereby putting them in a position to accept responsibility to provide it. Conversely, since the government accepted the responsibility to provide us aid, they will then exercise their authority to manage how they provide that aid and legislate our behaviors.

From a national view, a prime example of the ramifications for not linking responsibility with authority together was our little adventure in Vietnam. The military was given the responsibility of removing the “red menace” infiltrating South Vietnam but was hamstrung by folks on Capital Hill and the White House by not giving them the authority to execute that war in such a way to assure victory. When it comes to the military, my personal opinion is that if the government fails to execute a political solution to an international problem, don’t deploy the military if you can’t stomach their methods. I feel our politicians have gotten lazy and are too quick to deploy the military instead of working a bit harder on a diplomatic solution. So if you politicians reserve the right to send in the troops, then back off and let them do their jobs.

But on a smaller scale, there are plenty of examples on how we fail to appropriately link responsibility and authority. Kids are given authority to make decisions but not held responsible for the outcomes. Smokers and obese people reserve the right to indulge in their vices but expect and get subsidized help when their health goes south. Some people choose not to work and are rewarded with government subsidies. Business executives can rape their company coffers and then “retire” with a severance package that could feed a third world country for 20 years. The number of examples is infinite.

The bottom line is that if we continue to disassociate responsibility from authority and vice versa, we’ll continue to breed a society of self-centered, self-serving, needy children who grow into self-centered, self-serving, needy adults.