Somewhere in your organization is a supervisor accountable for a team's performance who cannot adjust a schedule, approve twenty dollars, or issue a warning without permission. That gap — responsibility without authority — is not a personality problem, and it manufactures the same outputs everywhere it exists: bottlenecks at the top, learned helplessness in the middle, and the eventual resignation of whoever was capable enough to feel the gap most sharply.
This worksheet maps the gap explicitly: a role-by-role table of what people are accountable for versus what they can actually decide alone, a bottleneck inventory that prices approval waits, an override log that shows what the team has learned about who really decides, and a repair plan built from specific written authority grants with guardrails — because delegation with limits is safe, and 'step up' without granted authority is a trap.
Who should use this faulkner systems tool
- Owners who have become their company's approval queue
- Executives watching good middle managers quit or go passive
- Nonprofit EDs and municipal administrators holding every key
- Anyone about to restructure — before moving boxes that won't fix anything
What it helps prevent
- Supervisors held accountable for teams they can't schedule, discipline, or reward
- Owner and ED bottlenecks that price every decision at days of delay
- Override patterns that teach staff to bypass their own managers
- Turnover of the capable people who tire of responsibility-without-power first
- Restructures that reshuffle boxes without moving any actual authority
What’s inside
- Part 1 — Role Responsibility vs. Actual Authority
- Part 2 — Approval Bottleneck Inventory
- Part 3 — Override Pattern Log
- Part 4 — Gap Diagnosis
- Part 5 — Decision Delay Cost
- Part 6 — Repair Plan
If the same people problem keeps repeating, the issue is probably upstream. Faulkner HR Solutions helps employers find the system failure before they blame the wrong thing.
Faulkner HR Solutions helps Texas employers, nonprofits, municipalities, and growing businesses fix the people systems behind recurring workplace problems. If this resource raised a risk flag, do not guess your way through the next step.