When I first met Karin in our first coaching session, she said: “My job is basically to explain results I already warned them about. If it goes wrong, it’s my name on the slide. If it goes right, it was a team effort. And either way nobody asked me before they cut the budget.” She felt fully responsible, but clearly did not feel the authority needed. It was a somewhat bitter start of our coaching. In this blog I tell Karin’s story a bit generalized. She felt fully responsible, but without the authority to match it, the accountability-without-authority gap in one sentence. Especially in matrix organizations I often hear similar stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, here is Karin’s story, to provide guidance and maybe eye-openers on how to create the authority needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Karin ran operations for a manufacturing group with plants in three countries. On paper, her name sat next to on-time delivery, cost per unit, and the safety record across all of it. In practice, the plant managers reported to the country CEOs, the supply budget was fixed by group finance, and the ERP system she lived and died by belonged to a central IT function two levels above her. She owned the outcomes. She controlled almost none of the levers that produced them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When she first described this to me, even before we started coaching, she did it lightly, almost as a joke about corporate life. In our first formal coaching session it already became much heavier. In our second session she shared that a delivery failure in the German plant landed on her desk, in a board pack, with her name on the slide. The plant manager who had missed the forecast was not in the room. The country CEO who had frozen the overtime budget was not in the room. Karin was. She spent the meeting explaining a result she had warned about six weeks earlier, to people who treated the warning as if it had never happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is the accountability – authority gap. It is the most common structural pain I see in senior managers, and it is almost never named for what it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Junior roles are clean. You are given a task, the means to do it, and the responsibility for the result. The three move together. As you climb, they come apart. Your scope grows faster than your formal authority, because organisations delegate accountability more readily than they delegate control. It is cheaper to make one person answerable for a cross-functional result than to redraw the reporting lines that would let them actually direct it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So the senior manager becomes the single point of blame for a system they can only influence. Karin could ask the German plant for a better forecast. She could not compel it. She could argue for the overtime budget. She could not sign it off. When the result went wrong, though, the org chart had no ambiguity at all about who carried it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The damage is not only reputational. It is corrosive in a quieter way. Occupational psychology has a precise name for Karin’s position: a high-strain role, high in demands and low in control. Karasek’s job demand-control research has tied exactly this combination, heavy responsibility with little decision latitude, to burnout and withdrawal more reliably than workload alone. The mechanism is simple once you see it. When effort and outcome come loose from each other, people slowly stop trusting their own agency, a pattern close to what Seligman called learned helplessness. You keep pulling levers that are not wired to anything. Eventually you manage the optics of results rather than the results themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Karin’s instinct was the common one. Work harder. Get closer to the detail. Chase the plant managers weekly, sit in on their production meetings, personally shadow the numbers. If she could not command the system, she would out-effort it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It half worked, which is the dangerous part. Delivery ticked up for a quarter. Her weeks went to sixty hours. And the underlying gap was untouched, because she had responded to a structural problem with a personal one. She was now doing three jobs, still holding accountability she could not match with authority, and quietly furious about it in a way that was starting to leak into how she showed up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is where a lot of coaching goes soft, and where Karin expected me to go soft too. She wanted validation that the situation was unfair. It was unfair. Telling her so would have changed nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The shift came when I stopped letting her treat authority as a thing she either had or did not have. Formal authority, the kind that comes with the reporting line, she genuinely lacked. But authority is not one thing. There is the authority of the org chart, and there is the authority you build, through relationships, through being the person who saw the problem first, through the credibility of having been right before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She resisted this. Hard. To her it sounded like being told to compensate for a broken structure with charm, and she was not wrong to be suspicious of that. So we made it concrete and unsentimental. We mapped every outcome she was accountable for against the specific person who actually controlled each lever. Not the function. The person. Then we asked one uncomfortable question of each line: does that person owe me anything, trust me, or fear being wrong in front of me?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For most of the German situation, the honest answer was no. She had a reporting relationship on paper and almost no real relationship in practice. She had been managing the numbers and ignoring the people who moved them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next quarter looked different, and slower. She invested in the country CEO who had frozen the budget, not to win him over, but to understand the pressure he was under and to be genuinely useful to it. She got the German plant manager to co-own the forecast in writing, so that a miss was visibly his risk too, not a private problem she absorbed on his behalf. She stopped protecting people from the consequences of decisions she had warned them against. When she flagged a risk now, she flagged it on the record, to the people who could act, and she let it sit with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She never got the authority the org chart owed her. That is the part I want to be straight about, because the tidy version of this story would hand her a promotion and a redrawn reporting line. Real ones rarely resolve so cleanly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What changed was that she stopped absorbing the gap as a private tax on her energy and her sense of control, and started managing it as a permanent feature of senior work. The blame slide in the board pack did not recur, not because she worked harder, but because the accountability was now visibly shared with the people holding the levers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the pattern beneath the pain. When responsibility and authority come apart, the instinct is to close the gap with effort, and effort is exactly what deepens the exhaustion without touching the cause. The way through is to name the gap precisely, redistribute the ownership honestly, and build the informal authority the structure refuses to give you. Building that authority is only half the task. The other half is making sure people still tell you the truth once you have it, a companion problem I explore in What Am I No Longer Hearing Because of the Power I Hold?<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n