5 Ways To Deal With The Worst Organizational Bureaucracy

Leonardo da Vinci once said: “I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.” On one hand, organisations have tons of resources at their disposal — human, material, technical and what not, while on the other hand, the bureaucracy of a corporate setting can easily put a damper on new ideas and slows down the work professionals need to get things done on time. Between needless policies, endless paperwork, and a lack of decision-making authority, one can start to wonder if the corporate “establishment” is actively trying to make our lives and jobs miserable.

The fact of the matter is that we probably won’t be able to single-handedly curb this kind of corporate bureaucracy anytime soon. But, by facing it head-on and dealing with it the correct way, one can make it a lot less frustrating. After spending a considerable time in the corporate sector, here are some ideas to get to the action and cut out the bureaucracy:

1. Set your destination

We assume that organizational leadership knows where do they want to be 5 years from now, 10 years from now, or even this time next year? These places are supposedly their goal destinations and although they might know that they don’t want to be standing still in the same place as they are now, it’s not always easy to identify what the real goals are.

Often bureaucracy comes into force when leaders focus on processes and forget about what the end result should be. This category of leaders are called Transactional Leaders or Micro Managers. The first and foremost question they need to ask: Where are they trying to go? What is the shortest route to get there, rather than making things complicated. Visualise your desired result, and keep the focus on that.

2. Set your priorities

As an entrepreneur, what exactly comes to your mind when you ask yourself: How you want to run your business? Do you see taking your company to the world? Exploring new avenues in business? Precisely, what you choose to do in life will most likely be determined by how you set your priorities. Sometimes, though, it can be hard to figure this out when you’re always in the fast lane and you start to lose focus on what you originally wanted in the first place.

So how do we figure out what’s most important so we can set your priorities straight? Well, it begins with us. “It starts with me. I must commit to making time for myself. Getting caught up in the details of life can cloud our vision around what’s most important to us. Even taking short amounts of time to breath, relax, process and plan will help us to reduce the clutter and see more clearly what we may have been missing before,” says life coach & Thumbtack professional Lisa Kincaid in an interview with Bustle over email.

3. Eliminate the unnecessary

Let’s ask very basic and simple questions to ourself as an entrepreneur or a CXO:

1. How many face-to-face internal meetings you convene or attend on a daily basis?
2. How many virtual internal meetings you convene or attend?
3. How many internal phone calls you make or receive in a day?
4. How many internal emails you write or respond to?
5. How many forms does your company have?

These are fundamental questions to be asked towards our approach of becoming Customer Centric. If we agree to devote this much amount of our work time for internal meetings, then who is going to look after the “real” customers? Company meetings can be helpful to communicate ideas, establish project goals, and identify responsibilities, but they can also be a huge drain on your productivity if misused. This is especially problematic in larger companies.

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4. Simplify the processes

Are there steps and approvals and work that people have to do that can be eliminated altogether? Keep an eye out for these processes and eliminate the unnecessary ones. Every time someone is doing something routine, ask whether it’s really necessary, or if can be reduced or eliminated. Can several steps be cut out to make things quicker? Often the answer is a resounding “yes”.

Always remember that a process can only be streamlined when it is simplified. This simplification of processes is usually achieved by removing complex or unnecessary steps. There are several ways to streamline company’s internal processes that includes various approaches and modern business IT platforms that help organizations thrive. As organisational leaders, we must discuss the internal processes and workflows and how to streamline to improve efficiency.

5. Prompt Decision Making

There are times when our team members come up with ideas, narrowed down options, and looked at the available data. You’ve asked all the right questions to guide your choice. And yet, for some reason, you just can’t pull the trigger on a decision. What’s the hold up? Worse than the top leadership team sometimes becoming a bottleneck where decisions are delayed and things pile up. When a decision is required, try to make it quickly. Make sure you have all necessary info, know what criteria you’re using to make the decision, and then make the decision immediately. The longer you wait the worse the problems become. Indecision is the enemy of action.

Delay or holding back is a tactic of slowing down a decision-making process in order to maintain the status quo. It is employed mainly by parties involved in difficult top tier leadership (though it can be used in other contexts) who do not want changes made. If a group is part of the decision-making process but does not want change, the slower the process, the better. If they do not have a say in the design of the process, then they can deliberately delay it by stalling on their involvement.

Final Word

Let’s understand it clearly that bureaucracy is not just confined to the public sector organizations. Some renowned leaders, in our country, when consulted for this very article, believe that whenever coordination of people is a necessity, bureaucracy is the answer to it. They also feel that bureaucracy helps realize organisational goals, at the same time it may make the mechanism appear more important than the desired end service.

However, times have changed and the general feeling of the employees working for bureaucratic organisations, the layers of management and decision-making ability are simply annoying for the fresh and bright brains around us. At least, that’s how the go-getters around us feel about infuriating bureaucratic ways that our organisations demonstrate their decision-making capabilities to their internal stakeholders. That’s because it turns out that the impact is even worse than we’ve thought.

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Learn how sometimes smaller things in our lives make huge impact and you can take some learnings on a personal and professional level by following me on LinkedIn and Evolve HR’s website.

Muhammad Sajwani is the Founder and Managing Director of Evolve HR which aims at transforming, enriching and evolving Human Capital of Pakistan, Evolve HR thrives in challenging assumptions that hinder organisational aspirations, by creating innovative solutions that yield maximum impact, scalability & benefit to a wider base of stakeholders. As a Business Coach and Organisational Consultant, Sajwani knows how to combine business insights with people insights to transform organisations and put them on the path to growth.