In a recent article, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini detail the toll that growing bureaucracy is taking across industries. Many of those working in the consolidating health care industry will immediately validate several of the authors’ key findings, including:
Bureaucracy Is Keeping Health Care from Getting Better
Growing bureaucracy is taking a toll in the health care industry. Clinicians and other frontline staff who actually help patients are subject to more, not fewer, fragmenting directives from above and are forced to devise work-arounds to cope with ineffective problem-solving systems. Great organizations across industries fight bureaucracy by explicitly structuring their leadership systems to connect everyone in the organization to the issues that the front line is encountering every day. They explicitly define the roles of each layer of leadership to include supporting rapid solving of frontline problems and developing those under them to do the same. Designing and actively managing their systems of daily operation (production), management, and improvement with this explicit intention to fight the wastes created by bureaucratic behavior becomes the core of their competitive advantage. Two cornerstones of this approach are lean daily management systems and a real-time approach to eliminating safety problems.