The bureaucracy was created to restrict human behavior in the industrial revolution (50's of last century), to educate workers (most of them could not read or write) in organizational behavior as replicable (behavior), as a structure of administration and management of people.
Do employers pay for telling people what to do or for deploying and releasing talent and knowledge?
After 6 decades do we still need bureaucracy in our lives?
I totally disagree with traditional leadership programs or traditional leadership, leadership is at all levels and not just in managers or directors. Leadership is a set of skills that are developed.
Your role as a leader is to create the safe environment that allows others to develop their skills, knowledge and behaviors needed in the existing context for a common goal or purpose.
As a leader you must generate genuine passion for an ideal of a common future, a common purpose.
Contrary to popular belief, organizations with restrictive organizational structures (bureaucracy) have no real vision or purpose beyond the misunderstanding of efficiency and making money, which by the way, are not purposes, they are missions (what we do, being efficient and making more money).
Such "false purposes" in many cases are promulgated by a short term system, promoted by investors, partners, participatory funds, whose only mission is to recover their investment in the shortest possible time and an extra profit of 2X, 5X, 10X; also called "tunnel vision" in the short to medium term.
A long term vision promulgates a mission to materialize with a purpose (what we do things for).
Bureaucracy is a drain on talent, and makes people want nothing more than to go home at the end of the day. Bureaucracy encourages the too-busy-now mentality, where people think they are conscious and unconscious, think they are productive and not, and are reactive and not proactive in realizing their lack of productivity.
It is not an honor to be always busy, it is a symptom of bad time management, something very common in today's society and encouraged at the system level. It is an excuse for not being able to do critical work because of prioritization, if I am always busy it is because everything is important and urgent, and it is not, because it has not been prioritized (pull vs push system). The lack of an objective and being too busy is the sure way to say no to the rest, the best human justification for not changing or improving the situation.
It is a reason to lose our humanity, not having any ethics, not being able to reflect on the good, the just, the beautiful, the responsibility and the truth. Letting ourselves be carried away by a false morality established to lose our humanity and be soulless machine.
To have time, we have to be autonomous and it is a prerequisite to have an aligned or common vision, mission and purpose. Bureaucracy allows us to hide the problems by delegation of the system and to justify permanent occupation.
The 3 principles of organizational design at present are
- For arrogance to deal with humility.
- For bureaucracy to create democratic participation.
- For the complacency to have the vision of the founder.
The two steps in organizational design are :
- Eliminate bureaucracy.
- Create democratic participation.
