A Simple Workaround To Overcome The Bureaucratic Mindset

The following is a guest post by Russell Bishop.

When it comes to internal roadblocks or organizational obstacles, more often than not the culprit behind these problems is an organization’s own bureaucracy. Ironically, even bureaucrats need workarounds when they run up against the frustrating bottlenecks created by other bureaucrats. Corporate bureaucracy and its close cousin, business process, often snag their own staffs in an impossible tangle of rules and regulations. Customers and suppliers frequently encounter roadblocks as they try to navigate the labyrinthine maze of the bureaucrat. One of the most perplexing aspects of process and bureaucracy stems from the fact that those frustrating rules were most likely created for good reason, but may have outlived their usefulness.

If you are trying to overcome internal roadblocks, you can complain about the other team, escalate issues through upper levels of management, or simply try to ignore their rules altogether. However, none of these strategies is likely to produce an effective result, much less one that will have the legs to survive. In trying to find an effective workaround strategy, you may need to actually get closer to the other team in order to find your way through.

In my book, Workarounds That Work: How to Conquer Anything That Stands in Your Way at Work, I suggest that the first workaround may be with your own self, with your own mindset. In order to move from blame and complain to effective movement, you may find it useful to ask “what difference could I make all on my own that requires no one’s permission except my own?”

Sometimes, that question alone will point you to steps you can take to overcome the roadblock, or to at least get things moving again. Sailors know that if the mast breaks, complaining about manufacturing standards won’t help, and so they need to come up with a “jury rig,” a temporary mast of some kind. The temporary mast may not be perfect, but at least it gets you going.

People Do Things for Their Reasons, not Your Reasons
However, what do you do if just getting going again isn’t enough? What if you really do need to get the other team on board? You have probably already learned that reasoned arguments aren’t enough and threats don’t work either. So what can you do? Here’s a little tip that may work hand-in-hand with doing what you can on your own: people do things for their reasons, not your reasons. If you want the other team on your side, you may need to find out what matters to them and discover a way for them to win by helping you get done what matters to you and your team.

In a twist on the sage advice about starting with the end in mind, begin by clarifying what you are trying to accomplish and why. Then spend an equal amount of time trying to imagine what the other group is trying to accomplish and why. The underlying “why” turns out to be a key in gaining cooperation or collaboration from others. Too often, people resort to not only blaming the other team for impeding process, but also imputing dark motives – “they just don’t care,” “they’re playing a power politics game,” “they want us to fail,” and all manner of other negative reasons. In 35 years of helping organizations implement strategies and accelerate performance, I have rarely encountered the team or individuals who spend late night hours trying to figure out how to make things difficult for others. Most people are trying to get something important done and the key lies in discovering what it is that they consider important.

To really understand the bureaucrat, we need look no further than the source of the word: Bureau is French for desk or office and “crat” comes from the Greek word for rule. Put them together and you get rules made by someone stuck behind a desk or isolated in an office. That means you’re likely to be on the receiving end of rules made by someone riding a desk, someone who likely has no idea what it’s like on the front lines. Rules and compliance procedures typically arise as a means to prevent risk of some kind, to save time or money, or to prevent waste. However, the bureaucrat may not understand the impact of those rules when you are trying to create value.

If you are going to find your way through the labyrinth of bureaucratic rules, much less streamline them, then you better start with a good understanding of why those rules exist in the first place. The hypothesis here is that the more you can understand the positive intent of the bureaucrat, the more likely you will be to come up with creative options that will not only help your cause, but theirs as well.

When Fraud Prevention Becomes Cause Prevention
If government waste has your attention, consider this example of bureaucracy run amok: the State of California’s Department of Community Services is charged with administering federal grant funds to not-for-profit organizations with a requirement that they maintain contracting and compliance processes to prevent fraud and ensure that monies are used for the intended purposes. Preventing fraud sure sounds like a good thing. However, only a good bureaucrat could create this nightmare.

Several years ago, a good friend of mine who is now a professor at a leading business school, took over as Director for this agency. He soon discovered that the contract attending each grant ran over one hundred pages, specifying all manner of compliance requirements. Tim did a little digging and learned that the contract had been growing in length as the legislature came up with new laws or regulations. That seemed to make sense.

However, he also began hearing from grant recipients that they were spending as much as 40 hours a month adhering to compliance processes. Digging even deeper, he learned that nearly 80% of the contract specified following regulations that were no longer on the books. It seems that as laws and regulations changed, no one had the responsibility for updating contract language for out of date rules, just adding new ones. As if that weren’t bad enough, an entirely separate compliance monitoring bureaucracy spent huge amounts of time and money enforcing those non-existent regulations.

Tim arranged a conference between several of the not-for-profit grant recipients and representatives from the contracting and compliance groups. He laid the groundwork for the session by underscoring the importance of contracting and compliance, showing a deep understanding and respect for the underlying reasons these groups existed. He also emphasized the value of the work done by the grant recipients and their commitment to using the monies wisely and in service to the purpose of the grants. From there, Tim led the group through a review of the contract, mapping terms to current law. In rather short order, the group knocked the contract down to twenty pages of relevant clauses.

Contracting was happy because their contracts followed the law and they didn’t have to spend so much time drafting lengthy documents that didn’t matter; compliance was happy because they could focus on relevant laws and eliminate time and resources being wasted enforcing no longer relevant procedures; the legislature was happy because monies were being safe guarded; the recipients were happy because they had more time and money to devote to their causes.

Obviously, it’s pretty easy to assail government bureaucracy, but how about industry?

Can We Engineer Them Right Out of Business?
A major aerospace company won a contract to put up a series of weather satellites. Putting satellites in orbit and having them work correctly involves a combination of routine practices and real rocket science. Performance is a big issue requiring some pretty serious coordination of efforts amongst contractors, subcontractors and the customer all along the way.

We all know that sometimes things go awry, ranging from launch vehicles that go off course to satellites that fail once in orbit. In this instance, the development teams had put together a pretty solid package based on prior success that won approval from all the key players. The contract was signed, and the prime contractor set about bringing the experienced sub-contractors on board necessary to launch another successful satellite.

Satellite component manufacturing can be complex to say the least, and it’s not uncommon for post-production testing to reveal flaws. To protect against flaws, procurement came up with a couple of additional specifications to the contract. The first “improvement” stated that if the manufacturer discovered a flaw on their site, the part could be reworked. However, if the flaw were discovered once shipped, the part needed to be scrapped. From there it spiraled even further out of control – procurement decided to “tighten up” the specifications and inserted tolerances that were well over double industry standards.

You can imagine the collision that wound up taking place: doubling tolerance standards meant more parts would “fail,” with a big issue centering around who discovered the “out of tolerance” flaw. Much more rework wound up being required than normal and even worse, considerable scrap wound up being produced when the “flaws” were discovered once they left the sub-contractor.

Eventually, the sub-contractor announced that they were exiting the business and would be shutting down their production line. The contractor first tried threatening the manufacturer into submission, but that didn’t work. “So sue me” was the response. Playing the national security card didn’t help either. The problem was that the manufacturer had agreed to terms that would guarantee they would go bankrupt.

There is a somewhat happy ending, however. Once the manufacturer announced they were shutting the line down and the legal threats proved useless, the contractor’s lead engineers got involved and engaged a joint session with the manufacturing team to learn why this long time partner was now exiting the business (what were their reasons). They soon discovered that in procurement’s effort to ensure program safety and effectiveness, they had inadvertently wound up saddling the sub-contractor with virtually impossible standards.

By bringing the groups together, the lead engineer was able to bring specs back into industry standard ranges which lowered the “flaw rate,” and they also agreed that a part could be reworked regardless of who discovered the flaw. This allowed the manufacturer to remain profitable, resume production, and accelerated the delivery of the satellite program to the government customer.

The aerospace contractor learned a great lesson here, and wound up integrating the procurement contracting process more tightly with the engineering teams to ensure the right level of controls were in place for future work. The bad news is that the program had already endured significant delays while “flawed” parts were being reworked, and even more delays while tolerances were returned to normal. These kinds of satellite programs typically run over one million dollars a day, so even “minor” delays have major economic impact. In this case, the impact had soared well past fifty million dollars.

Simple Solution: Focus on the Outcome for All Concerned
The simple solution for just about any bureaucratic roadblock: gather your teams together and ask a series of questions to learn what matters to all parties: What are we trying to accomplish here? Why does it matter (to tease out risk and reward options)? How does our current process help? How does our current process hinder? From there, you may find that you can co-create processes that will help all parties achieve what matters most.

If you want more information on how you can overcome people, processes or systems that get in the way, please download a free chapter from my new book, Workarounds That Work. You’ll be glad you did.

Russell Bishop is an educational psychologist, author, executive coach and management consultant whose clients include Fortune 500 executives in aerospace, healthcare, pharmaceutical and biotechnology, information technology, telecommunications and oil and gas.

Russell serves as the Senior Editor-at-Large for the Business and Living sections of The Huffington Post. He is also the author of the book “Workarounds That Work: How to Conquer Anything That Stands in Your Way at Work”, which I will be reviewing in the next installment of the Coffee House Book Review series. You can learn more about Russell and his book on his website at RussellBishop.com.