Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast.

A conversation designed to help leaders go further faster.

On today's podcast, we'll look at the tricky relationship between responsibility and authority.

Andy, I'm excited about today's podcast because you often hear people complain about being

given the responsibility for something, but not the authority to do anything about it.

But in a recent staff meeting, you address that tension.

Yeah.

In a healthy organization, our responsibility will always exceed our authority.

In a healthy organization, actually everybody in the organization's responsibility should

exceed the authority, which sounds a bit like a contradiction, but it's not because,

this isn't original with me, we want employees to feel like owners, not employees.

An employee is going to stay in their lane when it comes to what's best for the organization

or what's even going on in the organization.

Because employee, that's pure employee mindset, is, hey, that's not my responsibility.

That's not what they hired me to do.

They'll just have to deal with that.

In fact, that kind of mindset leads to unhealthy competition within a department division or

an organization.

I want our staff to feel some sense of responsibility for everything we do, even though it's not

what we hired them to do.

Again, they have authority over the area we've hired them to work in, but I want them to

feel responsible for everything in the organization.

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