Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

Welch's 21 Steps to Management Greatness - 11  

Get Rid of Bureaucracy

The one thing, possibly more than any other, that discourages and hampers workers is bureaucracy. Welch hated it with a vengeance and continually battled it throughout his career at General Electric (GE).

Welch said that the only way you can tap into the power of our people is to "to turn them loose, and get the management layers off their backs, the bureaucratic shackles off their feet and the functional barriers out of their way."

The first thing Welch said about bureaucracy was to realize that it was an enemy. It is something that can destroy a company in a very short time.

Here's a few thoughts he threw out on how to combat it:

Delayer, create a flat responsive organization.

Drop unnecessary work.
 
Make your workplace more informal.
 
Cross-pollinate to make faster and better decisions.
 
Encourage employees to identify problems and come up with solutions.
 

If we have problems with bureaucracy in our companies, it can't be completely done away with overnight. But taking these insights from Welch and immediately starting to apply them will make changes happen in a pretty fast way.

When it comes down to it, Welch is saying that anything that gets in the way of our people needs to be removed. That's becoming a bigger part of being a business leader than ever before. It's not something that can be done and then left alone, it requires constant vigilance, as human nature tends to want to move back to this way of doing things out of habit.