Only a busy fool follows a bad process blindly. Let me explain.
Welcome to Lead Prompt // executing leadership from the root. I’m your host, John Collins.
Today, I want to talk to you about a disease that infects almost every growing company. It masquerades as productivity. It disguises itself as safety, but in reality, it is the silent killer of innovation. I’m talking about busy work. And more importantly, I’m talking about your moral obligation as a leader to subvert bad processes.
There are few things I hate more in life than busy work. I define busy work as any activity that is imposed upon you by some process, but it adds absolutely zero value to the end customer or the business bottom line.
Examples are everywhere: filling out ten-page justification forms, capturing data or documentation that nobody will ever actually read, or waiting days for written approval on a task that obviously needs to be carried out, but is somehow stuck in a digital queue waiting on a middle manager's thumbs-up.
All organizations contain busy work, but in my experience, large enterprises have a staggering amount of this compared to small startups.
Why? Because as companies scale, they hire people whose sole job is to manage risk. They build processes for the lowest common denominator, creating systems that treat highly capable, intelligent professionals like children who cannot be trusted to make decisions.
The thing is, I am a startup guy at heart. So even when I work in a large enterprise, I carry that mentality with me. I tend to ignore busy work as much as humanly possible, and I explicitly tell my teams to do the exact same thing.
Let's get one thing straight: If your effort is not moving the needle on something, then it is wasted effort. It burns through the most precious commodity that we all have in limited supply: time. You do not pay top-tier engineers, creatives, or managers to tick boxes on a spreadsheet that gets sent into a corporate black hole.
In fact, I hate busy work SO MUCH that it genuinely offends me. I get offended when I am asked to waste my time on trivial process requirements when I know I can add tangible, measurable value elsewhere. Unless you work in a highly regulated financial or healthcare organization where lives or the law are on the line, you should strive as a leader to aggressively reduce the burden of busy work for you and your teams.
How do you do it? You do it by subverting bad processes.
Let me give you a real-world example. One of the large enterprises that I worked at used to have a formal Change Advisory Board (or CAB). This committee would meet each week to review and approve application changes before they ever saw the light of day in production. It was your classic “gated process.” Think of it as a bureaucratic tribunal that sits in judgment of your deployment schedule.
In all the years that I worked at that company, I never attended that meeting. Not once.
I quietly told my teams to ignore the CAB entirely. We were pushing half a dozen releases to production each week. If we stopped to fill out their forms and wait for their weekly blessing, our velocity would have flatlined.
On the one hand, we had business stakeholders screaming at us to go faster, to deliver features, to fix bugs. On the other hand, we had bureaucrats telling us to slow down and fill out paperwork.
I decided to side with the business. We relied on our own automated testing and peer reviews to maintain quality, and we completely bypassed the red tape. And you know what? My career there never suffered any ill effects. We delivered, and the results spoke louder than the missing paperwork.
As a senior leader, you have got to make these priority calls and own them completely.
My teams had "air cover" from me to ignore the BS processes. In fact, it was a directive. I told them to ignore it. Leadership isn't just about pointing out the destination; it is about clearing the debris off the road so your team can actually get there.
If there was any blowback, if a process manager got upset that we didn't file a specific ticket, that blowback landed squarely on my desk and not on my team. You cannot ask your team to work fast and then let them take the heat when they break a silly rule to do so. You have to be the umbrella.
To do this effectively, you have to understand the mindset of a bureaucrat.
They fundamentally believe that if a process is executed perfectly, you will get perfect results. It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, because it is ridiculous. The world is too complex for that. But that is the rigid mindset you are up against.
Bureaucrats measure success by process adherence, not by business value. You cannot change their minds with logic. You cannot change their minds with reason. You cannot even reassure them that you will personally own the risk so they will not be blamed.
They are TERRIFIED of risk. Their entire career is built on a foundation of "Cover Your Back." That is exactly why you won’t find bureaucrats in an early startup. The environment is too volatile for them. They only arrive later when the company scales to become a larger enterprise.
Because you cannot reason with them, you need to work around them, not with them.
Your business stakeholders will not care that you missed a deadline because you were busy executing the "perfect process" with all the required documentation. They will only care that you are late. At the end of the day, the outcome matters far more than the process. You might be tempted to just delegate this process management down to your team so at least your time is not wasted. Do not do this. Their time being wasted will ultimately aggregate back up to you anyway in the form of overall project delays and low team morale.
Instead, adopt the subversion playbook:
- Assess the blast radius: Distinguish between actual legal compliance and just middle-management preferences.
- Starve the process: Do the absolute bare minimum required to keep the lights on.
- Be the shield: Take the heat so your team can focus on the work that matters.
Ignore, avoid, delay, or otherwise subvert. The cost of full engagement with a bad process is far higher than the cost of breaking the rules to deliver a great result.
That’s it for today. Get out there and clear the road for your teams. I’m John Collins, and this has been Lead Prompt.
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