Every time you add a task that isn’t directly contributing to sharing your Promise or keeping your Promise, you’re adding bureaucracy.
Every time you employ someone to making other people are doing their job, you’re adding bureaucracy.
You probably don’t think of your small business as bureaucratic.
But it could well be headed that way.
Bureaucracy is wasteful, of money and of human talent. You can avoid it, by thinking differently about what a business is, and designing your business around that.
For me a business is a system for making and keeping promises:
And the way to design it on purpose is this:
Give your people end-to-end processes to run. No handovers, no batching. Ideally, the whole of Share Promise and Keep Promise, plus in parallel, Improve Process. At least, the whole of Share Promise, and the whole of Keep Promise, pehaps for a particular Package or offer. In effect, everyone looks after a subset of clients from beginning to end.
Give your people full responsibility for improving the system. Give them (and you) direct feedback as a side-effect of running these processes, so they can make adjustments as they go. Have people check each other’s work as part of the process if needed. Get people together on a regular basis to share potential improvements.
Give your people the resources they need to do all this. Support them with a map that tells them where they are headed, and a compass that keeps them in the right direction if they get lost. Or if you prefer a musical analogy, a ‘score’ that tells them what to play but not how.
Reward them with a share of the consequences. You’ll be well able to afford it, because you won’t be spending your money on bureaucracy, just productivity.
For a brilliant example of how to do this, read “500% How two pioneers transformed productivity”.
It took them 10 years.
You don’t have to take that long.
Discipline makes Daring possible.