Bureaucracy thrives in darkness. Turn on the lights.

About 5 years into my practice, I noted some commonalities in the issues my customers faced, and so I developed and adopted a process I’ve called SAFER as a management process for my own business, my clients and customers.? SAFER is an acronym for Strategy, Alignment, Focus, Execution and Review.?

It starts with Strategy, because you can’t get anywhere unless you know where you want to go, or as Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else”.? Where you’re going, your vision of the company, what you want your business to look like in 5 to 10 years is the foundation of any plan, business or personal, and strategy is the road map towards that vision.

Once you know where you’re headed, the problem of the leader is to make sure that the energy of the team is Aligned, Focused, Executing and that the results are being Reviewed. The only way I know to do that is to have clearly defined goals and then to make sure that the team members 1. Know what they are.? 2.? Know what their role in reaching them is.? 3.? Know that their performance and progress towards those goals is being measured in an objective manner, and 4. That the results are transparent, that is, that they and their co-workers can see results.?

The first two are obvious, clarity of purpose and clarity of one’s role is vital.? The third is accountability towards progress measured objectively.? Clear goals, measured objectively and time sensitive. ??The fourth, that others will also know, is key.? It makes it harder for a bullshit artist to cover up their failures.

Your best people will thrive under the clarity of this process, but not everyone will.? There are people, and for some reason government agents and bureaucrats come to mind, who like vague nebulous goals, ideally goals that can never be reached.? If you can’t define the goal, then you cannot measure progress towards the goal, and if you can’t measure progress towards the goal, then you will never know if you got there.? And that, of course, if you’re a bureaucrat, means that you have life time employment, not just for yourself, but for your cronies, and perhaps your children and grandchildren.? “We are studying the problem so that we have a clearer understanding of how to move forward”.? That’s bureaucrat speak for “I am not touching this with a ten foot pole. And, I’m fine with that, I’m going to hire a few of my pals to work in this really tough problem.”

Oscar Wilde allegedly said “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy”, or as often misquoted, "the purpose of a bureaucracy is to expand the bureaucracy".? True (either one) that.? Besides, as we all know, the real purpose of a bureaucracy is to say “no”.? If the answers were yes, then you wouldn’t need a bureaucracy at all.

The challenge to you in the private sector is to provide sufficient clarity and definition so as to identify and expose the impostors in your business who are self-identifying as workers.? As soon as you establish objective standards of performance, you will discover the people who don’t like being held to an objective standard of performance.? They are impersonators, they are impersonating someone actually working for you.? They are worse than dead weight, the inertia which they bring to the job spreads to everyone around them and makes team progress harder to achieve.? Visualize someone on an 8 oar scull doing nothing except repeatedly telling the other seven how important he is to the effort, how hard they are working to capitalize on the rowing experience, but not actually touching an oar.? Their boat mates would throw them over the rail.?

Turn on the lights, bureaucrats can’t stand it, ignore their pleas that they are doing important work for the future but can’t tell you exactly how it is going to work right now, or in your lifetime for that matter.? Everyone on your team will thank you, because they already know who the impostors are, and are wondering why you don’t do something about it.

If you want to learn more about SAFER, lmk.