Accountability and Authority

The keys to a good job description

A few years ago, I discussed bureaucracy with Russ Roberts. These issues keep coming up, and I think it is a podcast worth revisiting. One excerpt of what I said:

a major characteristic of bureaucracy. One of its functions, it's certainly not--maybe it's even intended, but often unintended--is to diffuse blame to the point where you don't have anyone you can blame. And so, businesses discovered, especially in 1980s and 1990s, that you wanted to have people accountable. You wanted the CEO [Chief Executive Officer] to be able to point a finger and say who was responsible for something, because CEOs were actually encountering their own bureaucracy and not being able to figure out who had made a decision, and so on.

Most individuals want more authority with less accountability. Bureaucracy will naturally evolve in the direction of diffusing accountability, if you let it. In business, the top executives constantly have to fight this tendency. In government, there is no one to fight this tendency, so it proceeds unchecked.

Job Descriptions, Done Right

Let me suggest what a good job description should look like:

This position has the authority to ____. It is accountable for achieving ____, which will be measured by ____.

Job descriptions are rarely this precise. A job description that includes verbs such as “prepares,” “monitors,” or “handles” is particularly likely to be for a position that lacks accountability.

Too often, job descriptions list activities. "The director of social media marketing writes tweets and post videos that support our marketing efforts.”

The authority/accountability approach would be to say “The director of social media marketing has has the authority to place content in social media.* The director is accountable for increasing traffic to our online store. This will be measured by click-throughs from the social media content to our online store.”

*If the social media marketing effort could include paying for advertising and/or “influencers,” the authority to do this would have to be spelled out in detail. I am trying to keep the description simple, for illustrative purposes.

The less authority you provide to an employee, the more difficult it is to assign accountability. If the social media marketing director’s tweets all require advance approval by a committee of higher-level executives, then the social media marketing director’s authority is circumscribed. And it becomes more difficult to hold the social media marketing director accountable for disappointing results.

In government, the tendency is to minimize the authority of any individual. Instead, a typical action is subject to a complex approval process. This makes it very difficult to assign accountability.

Nobody acts with the intention of doing away with accountability. But in government there is no one with an incentive to maintain accountability. The organizational structures and behaviors that emerge and survive are ones that diffuse accountability.

This is one of the reasons that government processes are not as effective as market processes. In the market, competition for profits tends to punish firms when they become too bureaucratic. It also punishes firms that go too far in the direction of eliminating bureaucracy, because this can result in too little reliability and too much internal conflict.

Competitive forces don’t make corporations perfect. Just ask anyone who as ever worked in one. But they do tend to be more effective than government agencies at aligning authority with accountability.