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with the delegated authority commensurate
with the responsibilities for the accomplishment
of results.” (pp. 441-449, Barron’s Business
Review Series, 1987) (Notice the circular
definition of accountability.)
Adizes says, “Delegation is the process of
transferring tasks down the organization hierarchy
and creating a sense of commitment for
carrying them out. The task can be to make
decisions or to implement the decisions. When
the task is to implement a decision that has
already been made, and the authority given is
only tactical in nature, it is called delegation.
If the task is to initiate decisions, that is to
make decisions as to what should be implemented,
it is decentralization.” (Ishak Adizes,
Corporate Lifecycles, Prentice-Hall, 1988, p.
40.)
Accountable relates to account as in financial
account and reasoning as in setting an account.
I have someone build steps to my house. I
delegate authority to bring people and materials
together to do the job. They are responsible
to use people and materials to meet specifications
on time within cost. Someone falls on my
steps. Who pays? Me. I’m accountable.
Max DePree says, “At the heart of being accountable
is the matter of caring.” (Max
DePree, Leadership is an Art, Dell Publishing,
1989, p. 41.) When you’re accountable, you
need to care. When you care, you’ll want to
hold yourself accountable.
The concepts of responsibility, authority, accountability,
and delegation are related and
work together as described by Daniel L.
Babcock in his book, Managing Engineering
and Technology (Prentice Hall, 1991). “Three
interrelated concepts of importance are the
assignment of duties, delegation of authority,
and exaction of accountability, as shown in
118
[Figure 1.1.14.1.1.]. Managers use their authority
to assign duties to subordinates, making
them responsible for carrying out the specified
activities. This assignment proceeds in
stages from top management down. A company
president may assign responsibility for
all technical matters to the vice president for
research and engineering; the vice president
may assign responsibility for all project matters
to a chief project engineer, who in turn
assigns the duty of carrying out a specific
project to engineer X.
Once a subordinate has been assigned tasks to
perform, it is important to provide him or her
with the resources needed to carry out the
assignment. This is called delegation of authority
and can include authority over people
who will be needed to carry out the assignment,
financial authority to acquire the equipment,
perform the travel, or make other commitments
of resources needed. Like assignment
of duties, delegation of authority proceeds
in stages from top management down. It
is an essential management precept that ‘authority
should be commensurate with responsibility,’
so that a subordinate has enough
authority to carry out assignments effectively.
Unfortunately, in many cases (especially in
managing projects) the engineer is not given
enough authority, and must rely on personal
influence, persuasion, or the threat (veiled or
not) of appeal to higher authority.
When the manager has assigned duties to a
subordinate and delegated authority to carry
them out, he or she is still not through. The
manager must exact accountability from the
subordinate by making the subordinate responsible
to the manager for carrying out the
duties and reporting progress periodically. The
manager has now made the subordinate ‘responsible
for’ the task and ‘responsible to’
report progress, but the manager is still accountable
(responsible) to the next higher level