How can you grow a business without turning the company into a complex machine of endless approvals? Yves Morieux suggests looking not only at structure and instructions but also at how employees interact, make decisions and take responsibility for the shared result.
Why more rules do not always improve efficiency
As a business grows, managers often respond to new challenges with additional regulations, positions, indicators and layers of control. The logic is understandable: the more complex the organisation, the more precisely one wants to allocate duties. However, an excess of rules can have the opposite effect. Employees spend more time on approvals, report preparation and defending their own metrics, while resolving a client's issue slows down.
An effective management system should help people act in a coordinated way. If each department optimises only its own area, the overall process can become more expensive and slower. For example, the sales department seeks to increase the number of orders, production seeks to reduce the number of non-standard operations, and the quality department seeks to eliminate any deviation. Taken separately, the goals look reasonable, but without cooperation they create a conflict of interests.
The main idea: cooperation matters more than organisational complexity
Yves Morieux's approach is built around a simple thought: productivity grows where it is easier for people to cooperate and see the consequences of their own decisions. This does not mean abandoning rules or control. The point is to keep the procedures that are genuinely useful, remove duplication and create conditions in which departments solve a common task rather than shifting responsibility onto one another.
Six areas for improving management
1. Understand what employees actually do
A job description rarely reflects all the real work. It is useful for a manager to trace the path of a task from the client's request to the result: where waiting occurs, who has the necessary information, which decisions have to be approved and why. Such an analysis reveals the actual dependencies between people and departments.
2. Empower those who bring different functions together
Every company has employees who help several departments reach agreement and see a task through. Their value is not always visible in formal reporting. It is important to give such people the necessary authority, access to information and the ability to influence the process. This reduces the number of escalations and speeds up the business's response.
3. Increase the room for responsible decisions
If any deviation requires permission from above, the organisation loses speed. It is more useful to set clear boundaries: which decisions an employee makes independently, when they must notify a manager and in which cases an additional check is needed. Responsibility and authority must be balanced.
4. Make the consequences of decisions visible
People make more considered decisions when they see how their actions affect colleagues, the client, deadlines and costs. End-to-end indicators — order fulfilment time, the number of returns, repeat enquiries, client satisfaction — are often more useful than a set of isolated departmental KPIs.
5. Develop reciprocity
Cooperation becomes sustainable when help between departments is the norm rather than the exception. For this, management should assess not only individual results but also the contribution to shared work: knowledge sharing, help in eliminating the causes of errors and participation in cross-functional projects.
6. Do not reward avoiding cooperation
If a department achieves its numbers at the cost of extra expenses or problems for colleagues, a result that looks successful on paper misleads the company. The evaluation system must take into account the final effect on the business. This builds the habit of looking for a solution that benefits the whole organisation.
How to apply the approach in practice
- Choose one problem process. For example, handling an application, launching a product or settling a client enquiry.
- Describe the task's actual route. Note the waiting, returns, repeated data entry and unnecessary approvals.
- Talk to the people in the process. Find out what information they lack and what constraints prevent them from making a decision.
- Remove one obstacle. Merge duplicate checks, reduce the number of handovers or give the person doing the work clearly defined authority.
- Measure the overall result. Compare speed, quality, costs and client feedback before and after the change.
The most common mistakes
The first mistake is trying to change the culture with appeals alone. If processes and indicators push people towards competition, a slogan about teamwork will not help. The second is carrying out a large-scale reorganisation before understanding the specific cause of delays. Sometimes it is enough to change the distribution of authority or remove one unnecessary check. The third is measuring the number of actions instead of the result: the number of meetings and reports does not in itself show whether the company has become more useful to its clients.
Conclusion
Business development depends not only on strategy, technology and investment. The ability of employees to quickly combine knowledge and make decisions with the overall result in mind is very important. The clearer the goal, the interdependencies and the consequences of actions are to people, the less need there is for excessive bureaucracy.
Yves Morieux's talk helps to take a fresh look at organisational complexity and to find the points where cooperation can be made simpler and more productive.
Video: How too many rules at work keep you from getting things done
Watch the talk and compare the author's ideas with the processes inside your own company.