Case Study: Dysfunctional Bureaucracy
The Subtle Art of Standardization
In a growing organization, bureaucracy emerges as a method for maintaining an efficient, reliable process for maintaining a high quality of work with a consistent timeline. As a consequence of Standard Operating Procedures, a growing company quickly forms a system of checks and balances to ensure that all is going according to plan. The intent of a bureaucracy is the same intent of an SOP: to enforce a trackable, measurable set of rules in which things are done the same way and held to the same standard.
Problems begin to arise when the amount of time required for a bureaucratic process to unfold becomes detrimental to the work throughput of the organization. As the organization becomes larger, senior leadership increases the number of people needed in any given workflow with increasingly large approval processes. Seeking to maintain control and reliability in the system, these larger bureaucracies begin to impose on the individuals within them, creating a widespread dynamic of dehumanization throughout the approval process. Laden by the system, individuals within the bureaucracy begins to seek a sense of value from the authority that their position in bureaucracy provides them.
It is at this point that the bureaucracy is in danger of becoming a dysfunctional system. While bureaucracy is a necessary evil in the ongoing evolution of a business, senior leadership must be weary for situations in which communication breaks down within the system. Overly constraining bureaucracies can lead to individual behavioral patterns within the system that cause delays above and beyond the delays already encountered by the process.
These delays can âclog the pipeâ with old tasks as more work comes into the bureaucratic process, leading to a cascading chain reaction of delay that prevents tasks from being completed in any reasonable timeframe. This ends up causing project delays, missed deadlines, unhappy clients, and many more systemic organizational issues.Â
A Closer Look â How These Structures Form
Dysfunction arises when inclusion in the bureaucracy induces a sense of disconnection from the purpose for which the system was built in the first place. No longer directly concerned with meeting client expectations, those within the bureaucracy begin to focus more on the task at hand: the processing and approval (or rejection) of work products that are under direct consideration.
As the slow, methodical nature of a bureaucracy is in direct opposition to the goal of rapid task completion, conflict arises between those in a position of power within the bureaucracy and those who are reliant on the bureaucracyâs process to achieve their goals. As those within the bureaucracy become inundated with tasks, those outside of (but dependent upon) the bureaucracy begin to become increasingly impatient with the wait time associated with the approval chain.
Due to the demands of project work outside of the system, some individuals will begin to reach out to those within the bureaucracy with pleas to increase the priority of their requests in the chain. As the approvers within the chain get more and more of these requests, they must make decisions on which to go along with and which to ignore. The prioritization of one approval also means the reprioritization of another, exposing the approver to more backlash as the requests continue. Fed up with the ever-increasing demands of the position, the approver âchecks outâ of the situation, slowing down the approval process dramatically and potentially outright ignoring the requests of individuals who have been particularly pushy.
The issue then becomes one of imperfect communication. The requesting individual doesnât know (and in many cases, doesnât care) how much work the approving individual has to process, and the approving individual doesnât know (or care) about the demands being placed on the requester to push the work through the approval process. This creates a toxic interpersonal conflict that only further exacerbates the situation, eventually leading to the disillusionment of one or both of the involved employees.
What makes dysfunctional bureaucracies particularly destructive is the fact that they compound upon themselves over time. Disillusioned employees may quit and need to be replaced, adding training/upskilling time as a further delay to the system. As the backlog of requests for the bureaucracy gets larger, the demands on it become greater, and the people on both sides of it become less cooperative with each other. Left unchecked, dysfunctional bureaucracies can dramatically increase employee attrition, lead to significant contract cancellations on the client-side, and make it nearly impossible to attract and maintain talented individuals.
The Path to Remediation
Remediation of a dysfunctional bureaucracy requires the instatement of a clear, third-party system of rules that governs the prioritization of tasks through the bureaucracy. Examples of this would be FIFO (first in, first out), time to deadline (the closer the deadline, the higher the priority), and functional group rotation. Core KPIs that track both inside of the bureaucracy and outside of it can instill in employees a sense of purpose to the seemingly tedious bureaucratic process and prevent interpersonal conflicts from devolving the system. Bureaucracies can also be designed such that the approval process can be completed without human intervention, thus removing the oppressive demands on time that bureaucracies impose on their agents.
Outside of systematic rules, dysfunctional bureaucracies can be stopped before they begin by ensuring that there are no centralized bureaucratic processes. This requires that organizational units maintain responsibility for their own tasks without top-down control, a proposition that may be unnerving for senior leadership. Allowing bodies of the organization to operate without militaristic control is one of the primary advancements in organizational dynamics that allow flat organizations to gain an upper hand in their industry (such as VALVe in the online gaming community).
