RESPONSIBILITY WITHOUT AUTHORITY WITH ED ROBINSON

A while back, I was having a chat over lunch with a very close friend of mine managing an ongoing ERP project, I asked how is the progress of his project. With a somewhat cynical and disdained look on his face, he replied “Well everyone is working as hard as possible to get things done, but the delays caused by the project are well…… caused by ineffective management.” When I pressed on if there is anything that can be done to rectify the situation, he replied in exact quotes “Well the problem here is we have responsibility without authority”, which really became the inspiration for this blog post as I thought he captured the essence of the problem in such an exact manner.

I then pored through some readings on blogs and articles online when I wanted to find out if this was a common problem in most organizations, and indeed it was.  Basically this is what is known as the No Authority Gauntlet (NAG) Syndrome. How you achieve the NAG Syndrome is very simple