I spent many hours of my undergraduate studies in the East Hall atrium. Located in the heart of the math department, the high glass ceiling and long wooden tables made it the ideal place to meet up with your study group if the library was too crowded. Plus, there was an old ping-pong table on the second floor. Always a welcomed distraction (if you could find a ball that wasn’t cracked).
I distinctly remember several large palm trees scattered throughout that atrium. They were ostentatiously fake, with a quarter-inch of dust blanketing each leaf. Despite their sorry look, the plants would have gone mostly unnoticed if it hadn’t been for their oversized maroon pots adorned with a hastily made sign, held up by three inches of masking tape, that read, “Please do not water the plants.”
It’s funny, but I never failed to notice those ridiculous signs. They were both an eye-sore and a personal affront to common sense. Each time that I found myself studying in the East Hall I grinned and shook my head in disbelief that someone thought those signs were a good idea.
The fake foliage must have been watered by mistake at least once. But did it happen often enough to justify those ugly posters?
Earlier this year, I listened to an episode of Craig Groeschel’s Leadership Podcast about eliminating distractions and cutting slack in your organization. As he described it, slack is any activity that absorbs resources but creates little to no value. Things like over-complicated systems, unnecessary policies, excessive procedures, and inefficient meetings.
Organizations never drift towards simplicity. Growth creates complexity. Someone makes a mistake once, and pretty soon it’s someone else’s job to make sure that it never happens again.
Cumbersome rules and processes are usually a vain attempt to control human behavior. Instead of trusting that people won’t throw water on a plastic palm tree, silly signs were posted.
Of course, not every rule or process is unnecessary. The mark of any successful business is the procedures they follow. They document how things get done so that they can quickly train new employees and make continuous improvements.
At the same time, no human process will ever be 100% foolproof. And while you should always work to reduce the chance of error and improve the quality of your work, you must avoid overreacting with rules that slow your team down and add unnecessary layers of complexity.
As your organization grows, be quick to eliminate unnecessary rules.
Hire great people and then train them well. When they make a mistake, be quick to teach and slow to enforce another policy.
Don’t rely on a tacky sign or a restrictive rule to curb behavior. Instead, trust and empower your people to do their best work. Then get out of the way and kill rules that slow them down.
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