The Curse of Business Bureaucracy

by James P. Tate on October 27, 2014

There are many in the business world who would insist that a collection of managers is necessary to manage a company.  While this theory may be true in principle, it can get out of control.  Managers have a bad habit of justifying their existence by holding meetings, sending e-mails and asking for more subordinates to expand their fiefdom.  All too often these activities are justified by the need to “co-ordinate” with other managers or to better control their departments.  The real truth of management is that there is too much clutter in many businesses.

This clutter takes the form of organizational complexity, meetings and e-mails.  Some clutter is unavoidable. Companies are formed to get people to do in a collective group what they cannot get done individually.  To get people to work together you need communication.  However, this communication can get out of control and take on a life of its own.

Take organizational complexity.  How many corporate objectives does your organization have?  The Boston Consulting Group has watched organizational objectives grow, on average, from 4-6 in 1955 to as many as 25-40 today.  Can any organization keep track of this many objectives?  Or, is this complexity just a lip service to satisfy outside influences that the company is “modern”.  Perhaps it is time to get to the core objectives of a company. Identify the 4-5 key objectives on which each manager should be focused.  Other objectives are really parameters within which a manager has to accomplish his goals

Another form of clutter is meetings.  We have all been forced to attend meetings in which there was a lot of talk and no decisions.  How many times have we walked out of a meeting, wondering why the meeting was even held?  To be effective, a meeting should have a purpose and this purpose should be stated clearly in the invitation.  There should be a time limit on the meeting (30 minutes is a surprisingly good length of time for a meeting); the objective of the meeting should be clear:  The meeting should have an objective of solving a problem; sharing information in preparation for a later meeting; planning a project or task; or updating a project or task.  Meeting management is a learned skill.

E-mail has become an insidious form of clutter.  E-mail is not a valuable communications tool when you have to read hundreds of messages each day.  The amount of time spent in reading e-mails just to determine whether you have to take action has grown geometrically over the decades since e-mail was introduced.  Many managers would prefer to “Reply All” on a message just to show their importance, or to avoid the possibility of offending a colleague by leaving them out of the loop.

Clutter has been shown to be detrimental to corporate morale and productivity.  It has been found that the creativity of people working on projects falls dramatically when their work day is interrupted by meetings.

Many companies have attacked management clutter in order to stream-line decisions and reduce wasted time.  General Electric has an on-going plan to cut overhead by reducing internal complexity.  Siemens has taken a dramatic step in abolishing an entire management tier and reducing the number of divisions.  Ford Motors has decreed that there should be one tightly scheduled meeting each week for managers.  One manufacturer saved the equivalent of 200 jobs by limiting meetings to 30 minutes and 7 attendees.

The next time you send an e-mail ask yourself: Do I need to include on the Send list anyone who is not directly involved in the issue at hand?  Should I reply to a message only to the sender and not to everyone else?

When you call a meeting, or are called to attend a meeting, ask yourself these questions: Is the time spent by the managers in this meeting justified by the expected result? What is the expected result from this meeting?  Are the people asked to attend the meeting those with the ability to achieve the desired result?

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