Give Me Authority, You Take Accountability

Ask employees what is most important to their company and its CEO and they’ll commonly claim it’s the functions that are reported directly to the CEO. However, from my interactions, it seems undeniable that the organization chart plays a significant role in revealing what is important to the leader... and what is not.

I have noticed that many CEOs like to hang on to functions that, in some way, confer power, authority, or control over people, money, and other resources. In other words, department heads leading functions such as sales, human resources, and finance directly report to the CEO more often than not. On the other hand, functions that imply responsibility or accountability (in particular, accountability to customers who pay for the company’s product or service) are, often enough, relegated down the line.
It’s not uncommon for people heading important areas such as customer service or quality to report to a boss who is not the CEO. What's more, I have seen companies where customer service or quality is not the main job of this boss. In the worst cases, the boss doesn’t even have any experience in these areas. This reporting relationship is more of an arrangement for administrative convenience, where the boss will approve (or disapprove) the customer service or quality person’s leave or bonus. Beyond this, he or she brings no value whatsoever to these jobs.

This is ridiculous. How can any job that affects customers not report to the CEO? To my mind, any job that has anything to do with paying customers mustdirectly report to the CEO, and engage more CEO-time than anything else.
The CEO’s “span of control” or inability to manage more than a specific number of direct reports is sometimes given as a reason for delegating certain functions. My answer: Manage span of control by all means, but do not relegate anything that affects your customers, quality, and permanent improvement. The CEO can always delegate functions that do not directly affect customers. This way, the CEO can focus more on customers and quality—which are bound to lead them to their usual goals of financial results and shareholder value creation. I have seen CEOs who have successfully done this, and hold out hope that someday this becomes the rule rather than the exception.

Another possible reason for some CEOs hands-off attitude toward quality is that they don’t fully understand and appreciate what a powerful enabler of sustained business results quality can be. For this, I would lay much of the blame with quality folks such as myself. If quality professionals create some kind of mysterious aura around quality and speak a language that can be understood only by other quality professionals, but not by ordinary business people, can we complain if some CEOs don’t fully appreciate quality? In my experience, one of the most important responsibilities of a quality professional is to help the company infuse quality into every function. Quality is nothing if it cannot help the business in a way that is visible to customers, shareholders, and the CEO.

Article Reference: Quality Digest