In Defense of Human Bureaucracy
Photo by Luis F Rodríguez Jiménez on Pexels:
There are always pressures for organizations to flatten their hierarchies. The goal is to remove bureaucracy and improve efficiency. A recent article in Inc. Magazine talk about companies replacing mid-level managers with AI and highlights one aspect of the potential damage this trend may cause.
A Coaching Crisis
Human management structures, despite their weaknesses, provide an organic environment for guiding, coaching, and mentoring. Algorithms may be able to tell people what needs to be done and how. But they cannot explain why. They do not provide context. If employees do not have the opportunity to learn why, they will never be able to grow into the leaders of tomorrow. Just as with history, we can know who, what, when, and where, but if we never learn the why, we miss what is really important.
A Loss of Strategic Alignment
Senior leadership sets the goals and objectives for an enterprise. As the message is filtered down through the organization, how the work gets done is defined by VPs, directors, and managers. How strategic objectives change how work is done. The effects vary significantly across different areas, such as HR, Finance, Sales & Marketing, and Manufacturing. It takes people having conversations and making judgments that determine success or failure.
The Art of Exceptions
Nowhere is human judgement more valuable than in handling exceptions. AI is great for executing standard work. Automation struggles with cases on the edge; cases with unusual circumstances, or when empathy is required to solve problems. If left to automation, bad things can happen. A pattern may be applied that will cause more damage than good. Or no action will be taken at all.
Missed Opportunities
AI excels at optimizing existing processes. But it has the same weakness as Lean and Six Sigma. Optimizing a process to increase efficiency and productivity fails to answer two fundamental questions. Why are we doing something in the first place? What brand new things do we need to do to be successful? Often, it is directors and managers who identify meaningful opportunities. Without them, organic innovation stalls.
Too Much of a Good Thing
This adage captures the current automation fever. The goal should be to optimize human bureaucracy, not eliminate it. We need to automate and challenge the status quo. We need bureaucracy with a purpose.
Related Articles
This Trendy Management Structure Harms Workplace Communication | Inc.
How dynamic work design can prevent overload | MIT Sloan
The Challenges of Becoming a Less Hierarchical Company | Harvard Business Reveiw
The 7 Challenges of Flattened Management Hierarchies | Primeeast
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Football is here.
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Quotes
"The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things."
- Ronald Reagan
“People learn best from experience and experiment.”
- John Sterman
“Don’t lower your expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations.”
- John Wooden
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I write about leadership in business and life. I am a certified M&A Specialist and Leadership coach. My perspectives are based on my 40+ year career working with leaders from around the world at over 100 companies.
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