Undocumented Features

UF Postings Past: Let’s Have a Meeting to Talk About the Report

March 30, 2008 – 3:35 pm

Bureaucracy is a natural part of any business. The longer the business runs, the more meetings and reports come to be. You can usually measure a company’s age by the number of reports and meetings it has.

This happens for many reasons. As the business grows, people have to deal with larger and larger groups of people working for them, so reports become a way to keep up with things. More and more unexpected problems appear, so reports, meetings and processes come into place to handle those. Meetings are held to discuss reports. Often, these sprout other meetings to discuss the reports that were used to create the report. On and on it goes.

The older an organization gets, the larger its bureaucracy tends to become. The corollary to this is that the more the paperwork increases, the less product is delivered per dollar. This hurts your bottom line and cuts into your competitive edge. What can you do?

First, fight the urge to create bureaucracy to deal with problems. Hold your people accountable. Don’t go on a firing frenzy, but holding people responsible for doing the right things and finding out the right facts before taking an action is a reasonable way to manage. If you examine your organization today, odds are many processes exist solely to eliminate the need for people to ‘make the right decision’ for themselves. You may end up having to replace some people in order to make this happen. If you do, though, is that so bad for your organization? You need the right people in the right place. Your other employees can spot those who can’t handle their jobs just as easily as you can, perhaps easier. They would respect you more if you show that you see that problem and do something about it.

Secondly, look around at the bureaucracy you already have in place. What part exists for good reasons? What part exists simply to prevent mistakes? How can you change things to allow people to have the right information to make decisions and trust them, rather than having them do things in ways that prevent them from wielding responsibility?

Empower your people. Get the bureacracy out of their way. They will love you for it. Hold people who mess up or are not capable of handling that empowerment accountable. People will respect you for it. Best of all, your bottom line will thrive, and all your stakeholders will love you for that.

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