Some of the most valuable people in an organisation are those who say:
“Don’t worry, I’ll sort it.”
They see something that needs doing and get on with it.
Most organisations value them enormously.
I certainly did.
But there may be an unintended consequence of all that helpfulness.
Helpful people can hide holes in organisations.
Imagine a responsibility that doesn’t clearly belong to any role.
Something still needs to happen, so somebody picks it up.
After a while everyone knows that Sarah does that.
It works.
Sarah may not even realise that she has gradually taken responsibility for something that was never intended to be part of her role.
Then Sarah leaves.
Suddenly:
“Who’s responsible for this?”
Nobody knows.
The organisational hole was there all along. Sarah’s willingness to help simply prevented anyone from seeing it.
There is another possibility.
Two conscientious people may both believe something is their responsibility.
Now Human Agency is being used twice to achieve something that required it once.
Or perhaps everyone assumes somebody else owns it.
Then it isn’t done at all.
None of these necessarily represents poor performance by the individuals involved.
They may actually reveal a lack of organisational clarity.
That is why I am becoming increasingly interested in the idea of Unique Responsibility.
Not:
“What does Sarah do?”
But:
“What does Sarah’s role uniquely exist to be responsible for?”
The distinction matters because people come and go.
The responsibility belongs to the role, not the individual occupying it.
And perhaps this gives us a different way of looking at organisational learning.
When something goes wrong, our instinct can be to ask:
“Who made the mistake?”
What might we discover if we first asked:
“Which role owns the learning opportunity this has just given us?”
That changes the conversation.
We can then become curious about what happened. Was the responsibility clear? Did the person have the information, authority, skills and support needed to fulfil it? Were two roles working against each other? Was there actually a gap in the structure?
And only then do we need to examine the choices people made.
Human Agency is present throughout an organisation.
The question is whether our structures help people use it effectively — or require good people continually to compensate for organisational ambiguity.
So perhaps next time somebody says:
“Don’t worry, I’ll sort it,”
we should be grateful.
But occasionally we might also ask:
“Thank you — but whose responsibility should this actually be?”
The answer might teach us rather more about the organisation than about the helpful person.
Related Articles:
Responsibility Grows Where Agency Exists: Why Accountability Begins with Human Agency
Human Agency and Unique Responsibility: Why Role Clarity Matters in Organisations