Screaming into bureaucratic void
Reddit, a social media site that calls itself the front page of the internet, has probably wasted as many working hours as Facebook. People post whatever interests them, then bored office workers comment.
Usually the comments are more interesting than the original post, and the topics quickly go off on all sorts of tangents. A story about problem-solving in the United States military caught my eye because talk shifted on to problems in bureaucratic organisations.
This voice of experience hit home: ‘‘A low-ranking person who understands a problem shouts about it, and nothing happens, for a long time.’’
Nobody above them bothers to understand what they’re shouting about, then suddenly, somebody with authority asks a question or hears about the issue from an outside source. Boom, there’s tons of noise on this topic, and somebody remembers the person who was shouting about it and asks them. And suddenly that person is in the limelight, and their ideas are listened to.
I’d like to say they’re always rewarded. Sometimes they aren’t, because the world isn’t just.
But if you feel like you’re screaming into the void, understand that it may not be a wholly wasted effort even if it looks like it is right now.
A lot of us can empathise with this, and we wonder why managers don’t learn from it.
Another guy added, ‘‘Often, they convince management to hire a high-paid consultant, the lowranking people tell the high-paid consultant where all the dirty laundry is. The consultant tells the management, and now that they paid for it, the management finally believes it (sometimes).’’
He described himself as a lowpaid consultant.
A former consultant checked in. ‘‘I was literally telling a colleague this last night. Eighty per cent of the job is finding the 10 employees who have been thinking about this problem but not acknowledged, and just listening to them. Ten per cent is writing up a summary. Ten per cent is complaining about changes to travel rewards programmes.’’
Someone else replied: ‘‘Current consultant here. Came here to say this. Yep, this is still true. I turned down a job offer once from a client because of this. They asked if I would come work for them fulltime and I had to respond, ‘But if I work directly for you, you will stop listening to me.’ That ended the conversation fairly swiftly.’’ Examples flowed.
‘‘It’s crazy how true this is. I used to work in a warehouse that had a bunch of organisational
‘‘A low-ranking person who understands a problem shouts about it, and nothing happens, for a long time.’’
issues due to growing pains that hindered productivity and product management. Although the warehouse manager had tried to implement systems to better organise, the owners didn’t want to invest. Eventually they hired a consultant, who came in and interviewed each team member, then ran those ideas upstairs; the same ideas the warehouse manager had been trying to implement the entire time I worked there.
‘‘After hearing the consultant, they fired the warehouse manager for not having already implemented the ideas/systems the consultant had put forward – the same ideas/systems he had been trying to implement for a year, the same ideas/systems he had himself told the consultant! It was a crazy thing to watch unfold.’’
Small businesses have a feedback mechanism that is pretty responsive. It is called the customer. If you start losing customers, then the money doesn’t come in and you know something needs fixing. But as businesses get bigger, the people in charge are removed from the product delivery, they don’t see the problems, and inertia develops.
For local and central government institutions, the feedback mechanism is supposedly votes, but that is just once every three years.
Worse, although one batch of politicians loses out, the new batch starts off convinced the system works because they won.
Beyond the politicians, there is often no response system at all. The customer cannot go elsewhere because it is a regulatory monopoly. It is no wonder that these organisations are so poor at fixing real problems. Once you understand this, the solution is actually pretty simple.
Every layer of management needs to commit some time to listening to the layer below, and to regularly assess the layer above on their listening habits.
The silencing of critics is not a success factor unless it is associated with reports of a proven solution being delivered.
If you are in an organisation where listening is a problem, leave this column where your manager can read it, on their desk or prominently in the staffroom.
If you are a manager and have just found this column on your desk or left prominently in the staffroom, there may be a problem you need to know about.
Shout your staff or customers a coffee and take a few minutes to listen to them. It will be worth your while.