Previously, I wrote about how bureaucracy is necessary but the pain that typically accompanies it is not. I argued that a big part of turning a coercive bureaucracy into an enabling bureaucracy is making processes work for people not against them. I claimed that processes or parts of processes can be value-added, non-value added but necessary, and non-value added unnecessary. The percentage of people’s time spent on value-added activities must be maximized, non-value added necessary activities minimized, and non-value added unnecessary activities eliminated entirely. Many non-value added activities (whether necessary or unnecessary) involve administrative processes, which often involve one of the most abhorrent features of any coercive bureaucracy: gatekeepers. In this case, a gatekeeper is someone who is in charge of all or part of an administrative process, ensuring the quality of paperwork before routing it through the process. At first glance, this appears to be a good and necessary function, but the way it manifests in many organizations is detrimental. The problem is not the function but the mentality behind it, which despite being well-meaning distracts workers from creating value for the organization’s customers, therefore reducing the entire organization’s effectiveness. Therefore, to successfully create an enabling bureaucracy, leaders must eliminate the gatekeeper mentality that prevents workers from properly doing their jobs and replace it with one that serves their people and customers better.

The Gatekeeper Problem

In an enabling bureaucracy, all processes revolve around helping people do a better job with less effort in order to provide value for the organization’s customers both now and in the future. If done right, the vast majority processes will either create value for the customer or help the people who do. The few that do not will be in the non-value added but necessary category, and as such will be set up so that workers spend the least amount of time and effort on them possible in order to focus on serving their customers. This is where the gatekeeper mentality clashes with enabling bureaucracy. Instead of seeing these administrative processes as subordinate to serving the customer, the gatekeeper mentality sees these processes as of first importance. Gatekeepers therefore require action officers (i.e., workers who should be focusing on serving the customer) to create detailed and polished “packages” in specific formats before routing it through the appropriate chain for approval.

This leads to a mentality in which the gatekeeper’s primary job is to protect the time of senior leaders rather than serve the workers who are serving the customers. Having been an executive officer managing senior leaders’ calendars, I can attest that the need to protect their time is quite valid. Senior leaders are extremely busy, so everything that can be done to maximize their effectiveness should be done. The problem comes when senior leaders’ time is optimized at the expense of the workers. This results in a few unwritten rules that tend to accompany the gatekeeper mindset:

• Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.”
• Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
• Haggle over precise wording.
• Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
• Question whether an action lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
• Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products.
• Multiply paperwork in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.

Actually, this list is derived from the Simple Sabotage Field Manual put out by the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the CIA) in 1944. While these statements could fit may organizations today, they are actually forms of sabotage used to undermine the Axis war effort. Our competitors have no need to sabotage our organizations if we do a good enough job of it ourselves! Since these or similar rules often accompany the gatekeeper mindset, it is no stretch of the imagination to claim that the gatekeeper mindset sabotages the organizations it infects.

In addition to sapping workers’ ability to serve the customer, the gatekeeper mentality sabotages organizations by fostering unnecessary enmity between workers and senior leaders. This is inherent in the term “gatekeeper”. Gates exist to keep unwanted people out, so to view administrative process owners as gatekeepers is to view workers as enemies to be kept out, which will result in frustration that no amount of morale-boosting attempts will overcome. Leaders can incessantly claim that they are there to serve the workers and have an “open door policy”, but as long as the gatekeeper mentality exists in the organization, their words will be futile and hypocritical. In this way, gatekeepers not only sabotage the worker but also sabotage their own leaders by inadvertently fostering distrust. We must stop the sabotage, which means we must zealously eliminate the gatekeeper mentality.

A Better Analogy

We have already established that the gatekeeper function is necessary even while the mentality is detrimental. Therefore, we cannot merely eliminate it but must replace it with a better mentality. Instead of a gatekeeper preventing workers from readily accessing their leaders, administrative process owners need to view their role as regulating the flow of work through the process. It is the flow of work that creates value, so anything that hinders that flow is detrimental, but it is also important to ensure that each step is not overwhelmed by too much flow. This means that a better analogy for the administrative process owner is that of a hydraulic valve. This valve must be open enough to facilitate the smooth flow of work through the system but not open enough to overwhelm downstream steps. Here, the gatekeeper is essentially a mostly closed valve. In a hydraulic system, such a valve can lead to too much pressure upstream of the valve, which can in turn cause damage to the line, resulting in cracks and leaks. But while this protects the downstream steps from being overwhelmed, it also prevents work from being done. In a hydraulic system, it it the fluid that does the work, so a trickle of fluid means not enough work can be done to truly create value for the customer. The valve must be opened!

One may argue that this analogy is too extreme, since work is getting done. The problem is that the work that is getting done in a system with gatekeeper-minded administrative processes is done in spite of and not because of those processes. In these organizations, people are unable to do their work by going through the nearly-closed valve so they bypass it, instead trying to capture and use the fluid leaking from the ruptured line upstream of the valve (or creating new lines entirely). It is my belief that people will generally do what is necessary to do their jobs, be it legal or otherwise. This means that when the process works against them, they will develop workarounds, which are almost always less efficient and effective than if the official process simply worked better. To reiterate, processes need to work for people, not vice versa. The gatekeeper mentality causes processes to work against people rather than for them, forcing people to either exert too much energy trying to use those processes or creating workarounds to avoid them. This saps the organization’s ability to create value for the customers. On the other hand, a valve mentality causes its adherents to serve both workers and leaders to ensure a smooth flow of value to the customer. All of this means that gatekeepers need to be replaced with valves.

Replacing Gatekeepers With Valves

What would it look like for the gatekeeper mentality to be replaced by a valve mentality? It looks like processes that are quick and easy to use for everyone involved. Workers need to spend minimal time and effort preparing things for approval just as leaders need to spend minimal time and effort approving them. Toward that end, it is necessary that administrative process owners actually own the process. They need to have both the authority and responsibility to constantly improve their processes. This means:

• making the process as simple as possible for everyone involved,
• minimizing (or preferably eliminating) the need to create products unique to that process,
• creating easy-to-use templates and samples for any unique products that are needed,
• making the process as transparent as possible so everyone involved knows where everything is at in the process, and,
• automating everything that can be prudently automated.

One way to do this is to use the same information in the same format for approvals as workers use to perform their regular work, thus avoiding any time wasted creating unique products. There are numerous software tools that allow for the easy display of information to anyone who needs it. For every meeting that should have been an email, there is probably a slide deck that should be replaced by these tools. This may sound like a dream for many, but it should be the expectation in an age full of tools designed for this purpose.

Approval authority also needs to be at the lowest level practical. When I was deployed, my squadron commander said, “if it doesn’t say ‘the commander shall’, I won’t”. By no means was he trying to be lazy or get out of work. Instead, he was empowering people to approve things at their own level whenever possible. In that context, there are numerous approvals that must be done at the commander’s level by statute or regulation, but everything else can be (and normally should be) delegated. There are various things that must be approved at certain levels by statute, regulation, or prudent policy, but in many organizations approvals are held at a higher level than they need to be. Also, anyone who has ever worked on hydraulics will attest that it is vital to eliminate air bubbles from the system. For an organization, this means eliminating non-value activities or steps. In most cases, much of the processing time can be eliminated by using parallel rather than serial processes, where everyone has access to review and approve simultaneously. Regardless, the number of reviewers should be as small as possible.

Finally, leaders will need to care for their people by both supporting internal efforts to turn gatekeepers into valves and working to relieve them from the burden of external gatekeepers whenever possible. In the end, shifting from a gatekeeper mentality to a valve mentality is yet another application of servant leadership that puts the needs of the workers first. Though it will be difficult (as with any culture change), it is necessary to establishing and sustaining an enabling bureaucracy in which administrative processes help workers do their jobs better rather than hinder and frustrate them. Ultimately, this means leaders and administrative process owners alike must follow the advice of a panelist at All Day DevOps 2020 and “make the right way the easy way”.