Borrowed Authority

In a lot of situations, authority changes shape like smoke. It's almost in your grasp and then suddenly it's gone. Some of it can belong to you by fiat and some of it clearly comes from no official order, even when nobody can quite say where the line is exactly. In some rooms, you have people waiting for your decision. And then, ten minutes after that room, you can have roughly the standing of an estranged relative at Thanksgiving.

And every attempt to clarify where every line is mostly focuses on formal authority. An org chart does a poor job of explaining the shifting nature of a room, because it can't easily represent all the interests at play.

Formal authority is needed and interesting in its own way; sometimes you have to lean on a chain of command. But I've always been fascinated by temporary and social authority, which is lent out with strings attached. People think someone will help, or that someone has been useful before or they know something. But those same people can take it back.

Nothing needs to be announced. Almost always nothing is.

Borrowed authority shows up like a bill you find on the ground. Usually as a surprise. It's all about timing. What's interesting is less that your opinion is sought and more that you're getting a sneak peek.

Something polished and already circulating usually means decisions have already happened somewhere else, whether or not you're invited to a "Review." The pieces have already been moved around and have settled in this form in front of you. Contrast that to something hitting your desk before it's ready, when someone is still moving pieces and they haven't hardened into anything yet. Questions and opinions can alter the shape of what's to come.

This dynamic is easy to misdiagnose. It's access, which is the obvious, surface-level diagnosis (congratulations! you're in the room!). But it's also soon-to-expire authority, an extremely temporary kind that hasn't been formally granted but which keeps the world moving. It's both of these things. Someone has decided that your presence during the messy part of work is far more useful than dangerous. To them and the task at hand.

Borrowed authority rarely gets formally revoked; it just dissipates into the air. And you miss that dissolution, are now trying to piece together why the team would now prefer slightly to a lot less of your judgment. Things start arriving later, fully formed, and now you notice that.

I always feel this siren-call temptation to explain the change. The authority tide going out needs an explanation, probably because ambiguity sticks in the craw and most of us would rather have a story than a shrug. Was it overreach? Doesn't matter. Every single possible reason (you've been usurped, the team can just handle it now, to name just two) is probably damaging to the ego but otherwise a fairly good outcome.

Perhaps nothing happened at all? As a species, we can be good at seeing tea leaves everywhere and assigning them a greater significance. We build which-way-is-the-weather-vane-blowing prediction systems in our minds.

It's annoying because there are no terms, no receipts or expiration date. But that's also freeing in its own way. Everyone involved is winging it, mostly, just guessing about what is maximally useful right now, including you.

Imagine joining some new institution and staring at all the official documents and diagrams until your eyes bleed. And now you get the test.

Can you answer who everyone is currently listening to? Can you understand whose question will send a new idea back to the drawing board?

Pencils down, please.

“Managing without authority” has always sounded wrong to me, even though it's supposed to describe a strength or a requirement of the job. It's slightly off to my ear. Because authority is there, actually, but you just can't easily see it. Or keep it. None of the formal stuff really works here. We'd need something much closer to a dynamic weather map, constantly redrawing itself around whatever problem now has everybody's attention like little possible hurricanes trying to form.

Plenty of authority will coalesce around those little hurricanes and find a home. Enough to do real things: change plans, redirect attention, sometimes stop something entirely. It just doesn't belong to anyone in any lasting way. Because eventually the storm might veer somewhere else or never really form at all. It'll end one way or another.

Your borrowed authority goes out with the storm. And you won't know when exactly the loan was called in until, one day, you're looking at something finished when you expected the draft.