10 Assumptions of Bureaucracy
By: Ashish Deora
Tags: Bureaucracy, Workplace Culture, Humanocracy

In the past the man has been first; in the future, the system must be first. This in no sense, however, implies that great men are not needed. On the contrary, the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management, the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before.

The above quote is from Frederick Winslow Taylor. According to Wikipedia, Frederick Winslow Taylor was an American mechanical engineer. His methods were widely known to improve industrial efficiency. He was one of the first management consultants.

Terms like first-class men, good system, the management in the quote gives a rough idea about how Employer and Employee looked at work in the 20th century. It was a century of building the most efficient systems, making more from less and establishing new efficiency frontiers

In absolute terms, efficiency is the ability to do things well, successfully, and without waste. Having no waste is not possible in a realistic world. In the process of producing something tangible or intangible, we cannot avoid wastage of materials, energy, efforts, money, or time. The process will realistically create waste of one or more resources.

Japanese thought tried to solve the problem of this Industrial wastage. The invention of concepts like TQM, Lean and Six Sigma was in the direction of reducing waste. The world adopted these principles. Operational efficiency was a tiebreaker between manufacturing giants.

Whether it is a scientific approach of Frederik Taylor or the mathematical one of Japanese, none of them addressed the core issue of in-efficiency.

I can say, without the slightest hesitation, that the science of handling pig iron is so great that the man who is… Physically able to handle pig iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig iron.

In the above quote, Frederic Taylor focuses on the rift between physical and mental abilities. Another quote is,

“Work consists mainly of simple, not particularly interesting, tasks. The only way to get people to do them is to incentivize them properly and monitor them carefully”.

What do you smell in these solutions? Maslow quoted that, “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail”. All are working on increasing efficiency, but no one is focusing on making it humane.

If your products will be consumed by Humans then they must be produced by Humans through Humane processes and Humane intentions. All previous attempts of the 20th century were to improve the mechanical aspect of the work. This introduced lot of distrust into the system. And when there is distrust, you have guarding processes. These processes will need keepers. These keepers will introduce more rituals and so on. As a result, we have a highly bureaucratic workplace with fat layers of managements (process keepers) managing people because they cannot trust them.

And then, these companies, who have injected so much distrust into the system, have a very unrealistic expectation. They want products and services which are resilient, accepted by consumers and which derive high profitability.

Management consultants realized that High Trust results in High Performance. So, they started to detoxify the system with their bane weapons. It is imprudent to believe that employees will trust the management if the management does not trust them in the first place.

I always believed in the purpose of creating a great workplace where employees trust their management, feel pride at work and enjoy the company of their colleagues. But this is just one side of the story. What about management trusting the employees. Do they trust them? The answer is No!

How can I say this so confidently? I was observing an interview of Jos De Blok, founder of Buurtzog, a Dutch home-care corporation conducted by Gary Hammel, co-author of Humanocracy. In this interview, he asks Jos how he drives and monitors the performance of nurses in a highly decentralized system? Jos answered that he believes that people like to perform. That is their natural tendency. Hence, he does not cling to high performance. He embraced the belief that enablement is instrumental in invigorating people to give their personal best. In other words, he trusts his people that they will perform. Correspondingly, the organization executes and does very well in all the aspects of efficiency that is an unsolved puzzle for many.

I was shell-shocked after listening to this conversation. Buurtzog is an ecosystem where employees trust management because management trust employees. Jos has uprooted the entire performance management machinery by simply doing one thing, i.e., by trusting his people.

I elaborated on this thought more and came up with ten such hacks. These must be utilized to uproot waste generating bureaucratic machinery from your organization. They are as follows:

Assumption 1: People do not like to perform. Hence, we need to put a performance management system in place.

Hack: Trust your employees. Remove obstacles that block their way to shine and enable them to give their personal best.

Assumption 2: People like to fight with each other at work. Hence, we need to put a grievance redressal system in place and monitor communication between employees.

Hack: Try to create an environment where solution-driven interactions are encouraged. Discourage blame game and ensure that all communications lead to permanent redressal of problem. Problems come from people, its solution will also come from them, not from experts.

Assumption 3: The manager plays a crucial role in appraisal and promotion decisions because zhe knows most about the individual.

Hack: Individuals should be answerable to their team members and customers (internal and external) and not to the manager. This gives immense freedom to an individual to perform and shift the focus from upwards to downwards. To make this system fool-proof, remove the manager’s role in an individual’s appraisal and promotion and let the data do the talking.

Assumption 4: People do not like to be friends at work. Hence, we need to have colossal celebrations and fun budget with bodies to govern the same.

Hack: Do not force people to be friends with each other. These will only encourage fake relationships in workplace culture. These will collapse at the first instinct of crisis. Start helping your colleagues in times of crisis. Promote a listening culture where people listen to understand and not to answer. With time, people will start trusting each other and might end up becoming friends for life. These trust-based relationships are everything that matters when it comes to camaraderie. Everything else starts and ends with the celebration.

Assumption 5: People do not like to help each other at work. Hence, we need team spirit building exercises.

Hack: Enable people to ask and give help. Acknowledge the resource requirements to be helpful at work. Team building exercise is useless if the individual does not have resources to help. Trust people with resources and they will eventually make good use of the same. Besides assisting each other gives an immense sense of satisfaction which will make them love helping each other.

Assumption 6: People do not like to change. Hence, we need change management experts.

Hack: People don’t like to change, that’s true, but people do excite for new things. Package your change such that it explains the need and the benefits very clearly. Also, explain the shortcomings of the current state and build enough training infrastructure where individuals get to learn at their pace.

Assumption 7: People cannot be organized at work. Hence, the need for work management machinery (managers, productivity systems, review meetings, etc).

Hack: Provide individuals with stability around their work and enough training and resources so that they can perform. If stability and training are not possible because of the nature of the work, please provide Clarity of goals and vision, mission. People are smart enough to find their way to the results.

Assumption 8: People hate to fail and hence does not innovate. Hence the need to hire Innovation experts at work.

Hack: Everybody hates to fail. But you can differentiate by loving them for their failures. Accept the failures with an open heart and mind and you will have a culture buzzing with ideas and experiments. Encourage risks and being vulnerable. Best ideas always come from two sets of people, those who are closest to the customer or those who are farthest. Anything else in between will be just an iterative improvement.

Assumption 9: People like to be managed. Hence need for a manager

Hack: People do not like to be managed. Everybody loves freedom. Recollect how excited you were to go to college when you were in school. How excited you were to go to work when you were in college and so on. Enable people to do work and they will do just fine.

Assumption 10: People do not know how to build their career. Hence, they need of career development plan for them.

Hack: Anybody who asks for a career development plan does not wish to have a career. Careers are not built on prescriptions. Make sure you are not giving them one. Ask the employees boldly about their aspirations, do not judge them if their vision is not intersecting with your business and give them ample resources to try-fail-learn.

The above ten assumptions give birth to toxic bureaucracy at work. We must encourage our people to be better human first. That is the foundation of building a Humanocracy.

To be able to build a Humanocracy, you must read your people like a market index. Continuous employee feedback on culture and actions makes the organization agile and promote a culture of “Free speech”. Many organizations feel that too much feedback will result in too much work for them, and employees will always have complaints about the management. That is not true.

Give your employees a chance to give feedback continuously through tools like this and you will find a good balance of positive and constructive feedback. For some, it might take some time for this balance to strike. But it will happen for sure.

Vijay Govindarajan quoted, “The more you hardwire a company on total quality management, the more it is going to hurt breakthrough innovation”

And hence my answer to Frederick would be, “Yes, the past was of man, the present is of systems and the future will be of man again!”

Note: Views expressed are personal