Don't Let the System Become the Work

You can follow every process in an organization and still fail to accomplish the thing the organization exists to do.

I think that's a problem worth paying attention to, especially as businesses grow.

Take somebody in sales.

Their job is to build relationships, create opportunities, solve problems, and ultimately generate business.

But as an organization gets bigger, more things start getting added around that work.

Another field in the CRM.

Another report.

Another meeting to discuss the report.

Another process for documenting a conversation that already happened.

And here's the difficult part.

Almost every one of those requirements can be justified individually.

Management needs visibility.

The company needs accurate information.

People need to be accountable.

I understand all of that.

You can't build a business that depends entirely on everybody remembering what happened and hoping somebody else knows what's going on.

But there's a cost to every system you introduce, and that cost is usually paid in somebody's time and attention.

I was discussing this with a salesperson who was becoming increasingly frustrated by the amount of administrative work surrounding his actual job.

What interested me wasn't simply that he disliked paperwork.

It was that the requirements were beginning to compete with the activities that produced the results everyone wanted.

And that's where I think organizations get themselves into trouble.

It's much easier to measure whether somebody completed a CRM field than whether they're developing a meaningful business relationship.

One gives you a number on a dashboard.

The other requires judgment, context, and some understanding of the work itself.

So over time, the things that are easiest to inspect can become the things people are most concerned about doing.

Not necessarily because they're the most valuable.

Because they're the most visible.

And once people realize that's how they're being evaluated, their behavior starts to change.

They spend more time demonstrating that they're doing their jobs, sometimes at the expense of actually doing them.

I want to be clear.

I'm not suggesting that employees should ignore legitimate processes or that businesses should operate without accountability.

I'm saying we need to distinguish between the work and the system designed to support the work.

If you're building the process, you should be asking whether it makes people more effective or simply makes their activity easier to monitor.

Those aren't always the same thing.

And if you're working inside the process, you still have a responsibility to understand what creates value, even when the administrative requirements are unavoidable.

Because a completed checklist can tell you that somebody followed the procedure.

It cannot, by itself, tell you whether the procedure was worth following.

Systems are supposed to help people accomplish something.

The moment maintaining the system becomes more important than the outcome it was created to support, you've started confusing the means with the end.

And the solution isn't another report about how well everybody is following the process.

It's being willing to examine the process itself.