Understand that the most important responsible-parties are those responsible for the goals, outcomes, and machines at the highest levels. Give me someone who can be responsible for an entire area, someone who can design, hire, and sort to achieve the goal, and I can be comfortable things will go well. These are the most important people to choose and manage well. Senior managers must be capable of higher-level thinking, and understand the difference between goals and tasks, otherwise you will have to do their jobs for them. The ability to see and value goals is largely innate, though it improves with experience. It can be tested for, though no tests are perfect.
Know that the ultimate Responsible Party will be the person who bears the consequences of what is done.
So long as you bear the consequences of failure, you are the ultimate Responsible Party. For example, while you might choose to delegate the responsibility of figuring out how to handle your illness to a doctor, it is your responsibility to pick the right one, since you will bear the consequences if he does a bad job. Or if you were building a house, would you go to an architect and say “show me the kinds of houses I can build” or would you tell the architect what kind of house you want to live in? This is especially true when it comes to money. If you delegate the oversight responsibility for your finances to others, they typically won’t hold themselves as accountable for your money as they would their own and they won’t fire themselves if they are doing a bad job. Only the ultimate responsible-parties can do that.
When putting someone in a position of responsibility, make sure their incentives are aligned with their responsibilities and they experience the consequences of the outcomes they produce. As an example, structure their deals so that they do well or badly based on how well or badly you do in the areas they are responsible for. This is fundamental for good management.
Make sure that everyone has someone they report to. Even a company’s owners have bosses, in their case, the investors whose money is being spent to achieve their goals. If the owners are self-funded, they still have to make their clients and employees happy. And they can’t escape the responsibility of making sure that their costs are acceptable and their goals are being met. Even if a person’s job is unique, someone needs to be holding them accountable at all times.
Remember the force behind the thing.
Most people see the things around them without considering the forces that created them. In most cases those forces were specific people with specific qualities who worked in specific ways. Change the people and you change how things develop; replace creators with noncreators and you stop having creations.
People tend to personify organizations (“Apple is a creative company”) while mistakenly depersonalizing their results, thus losing sight of who did what to produce them. That’s misguided because companies don’t make decisions, people do.
So who are the people in your organisation behind the results and culture that make it special? Think about who they are and how they work together to make it what it is.