Responsibility is about who owns accessibility. Authority is about power to approve the work.
Of all the objections in this series, authority is the hardest to push back on. Not because it's the most valid, but because it's the most polite. It sounds professional, like someone who knows their place and respects it.
So they just say: "It's not my call."
They might genuinely not have the final say. But that's different from having no say at all.
Responsibility and authority can look identical. After all, both objections end with someone pointing elsewhere. But they're different problems with different solutions and misreading one for the other means you try to solve the wrong thing entirely.
The tell is in the detail.
A responsibility deflection names a team or a system. "That's a dev thing." "It goes through QA." It sounds much like a process, with nobody specific in charge.
An authority objection gets more specific. "I'd need to run that past so and so." "That would need board sign-off." Notice how there's a person or a process at the end of that sentence.
Sometimes, this objection is real. Organisational hierarchy is real and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
But authority and influence are not the same thing. Very few people have zero ability to shape how the right person with authority sees the issue. The way you frame it shapes decisions even when you're not the one making them. Saying "it's not my call" is often a way of avoiding the discomfort of having to fight for something.
Don't mistake that for humility. It's a choice you're making.
Sometimes, all I need is to ask the right question without sounding like I'm going around them. They might admit they don't have the authority to make the call, but what's the point of rubbing it in their faces?
"Who else would need to be involved in this conversation?" is a completely different question to "who's your boss?" It doesn't sound like I'm trying to go around them. The follow-up question is just as useful: "What would they need to hear to say yes?" Now I'm not asking them to make the call and instead I'm asking them to help me make the case to someone who can. I'm actively enlisting their help and expertise to help me find the right person and convince them together. Most people want to help if they don't feel like they're being sidestepped.
Sometimes, the person I need to talk to is completely out of my reach.
It's difficult and honestly the only way forward is to work with what I have. I focus on making the person in front of me the most effective advocate possible. That means I stop selling and start coaching. Instead of convincing them, I'm helping them convince someone else.
That's a fundamentally different dynamic because suddenly I'm on the same side of the table as them.
Authority is rarely as fixed as people think. I've almost always found a path to the right person when I was willing to have a different kind of conversation than the one most people try to have.
Priorities is a different beast entirely. Every other objection in this series has a workaround. This one sometimes doesn't. We'll get into why next.