The line in a job description that lies the most is the one under “areas you will be responsible for”.
Growth goes there. Brand perception goes there. Customer experience goes there. Then the person starts the job and learns that pricing is decided on another floor, that the product calendar is locked in another meeting, that the budget gets cut mid-year without warning. Not one lever behind the outcomes in that description is in their hands. But at the end of the quarter, they are the one who answers for it.
I call this responsibility without authority. It is the most common and least discussed design flaw in organisations.
A hundred-year-old equation
When Henri Fayol set out his principles of management in 1916, he put authority and responsibility second on the list and refused to separate them: responsibility is the natural consequence of authority. I think of it as a pair of scales. If you hand over one, you hand over the other; when one side outweighs the other, the system breaks. It is a sentence taught in the first week of any management course and then broken for forty years on every organisation chart.
Why does it get broken? Because authority is expensive to give and responsibility is free. When you delegate authority you lose control; the chance of a bad outcome stops being yours. When you delegate responsibility you lose nothing, and you gain insurance on top: if things go wrong, there is a name to ask.
Put plainly: giving someone the outcome without the levers is not giving them a job. It is blame, prepared in advance.
What saves the seat
In mid-September two large US retailers rewrote their marketing chiefs’ job descriptions. Target, after roughly twenty months without a dedicated CMO, rebuilt the seat and attached its retail media network and its marketplace to the new hire. Lowe’s added e-commerce to its CMO’s portfolio. The trade coverage read both as promotions. I see something else: both companies have done the maths on years of giving marketing responsibility for growth while keeping the levers of growth on other desks.
According to the report Spencer Stuart published in January, 31 per cent of S&P 500 companies have no CMO. The reason is not that marketing has become unimportant. When you give a seat authority over the message alone and expect sales from it, within a few years that seat looks like a failure. Then it is removed. Then someone says “marketing just didn’t work for us”. But it was not marketing that failed. It was the scales.
A title defines a seat. Who holds the levers defines how many years the person in it will last.
In agencies we live a small copy of this every day. The creative director is told “you are responsible for the quality of the work”, yet they do not decide who is staffed on which project, how many rounds of revisions were promised to the client, or how the schedule is built. When quality drops, they are still the first one people look at. So when you are offered responsibility for an outcome, count the levers first. How many are yours? For how many do you have to ask permission? Every lever you need permission for means the outcome really belongs to someone else.
Someone will say: you cannot give every lever to one person, and in a large company, hand pricing to marketing and your margin melts. It is a fair objection. But the answer is not to scatter the levers; it is to shrink the target to fit the levers you have actually handed over. You do not write a profitability target for someone who does not control price. If you do, what you are building is not a target but an alibi.
This is not dodging responsibility. Quite the opposite: the only way to take responsibility seriously is to know exactly what you are taking responsibility for. The person who accepts a target with no levers is not brave. They have simply signed too early.
The same question applies to management. When you write a target for a team, put the list of decisions that affect that target next to it and look at whose name sits beside each decision. If the two lists do not match, the problem is not the team. It is the chart you drew.
No one stays standing for long on the empty side of the scales.