A bureaucrat isn’t a person or role as much as it is a mindset attached to someone with legitimate status or influence at any level in an organization.
Bureaucrats are made, not born, and they come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. No matter what they have been asked to do or what role they play in an organization, people become bureaucrats by the nature of their attitude and worldview.
Here’s how to spot one: First and foremost, bureaucrats live to kill ideas and innovation of any kind.
This is not because they are bad people or can’t see the value in ideas, but because they believe failure carries more weight than success.
The heart of a bureaucrat sees a new idea or an innovation as creating more risk, more work, and less control. So, they do their best to keep such concepts from capturing any light or gaining any traction.
The first thing a bureaucrat does when they hear of a new idea is to give a pejorative label in the hopes that it sticks.
Because labels create the first impression others will draw when learning about the idea, they can poison the receptivity a good idea might have.
Labels like “expensive,” “impractical,” “risky,” “unrealistic,” “unworkable,” and “ill-considered” come to mind. You can always spot a bureaucrat by the labels they attach to new ideas.
But negative labels are just for openers. Bureaucrats are experts at sitting on ideas (or requests and proposals) until they die.
They create ways to postpone, delay, and otherwise stall any new idea from gaining momentum. They filter the idea through endless layers of approvals, checks, and inspections, all the while claiming they are protecting the organization from unnecessary risk.
Bureaucrats don’t add much value in an organization, and when they exist in large numbers, they can make life miserable for those responsible for growth, innovation, and productivity.
They can sit in any role, chair, or position. It is their mindset that makes them bureaucrats, not the authority or unit they are in.
Because they lower morale with their actions and destroy the initiative to bring forth new ideas, they chase away high talent.
As the childhood story goes, “If you give a mouse a cookie, the mouse will want a glass of milk.” In the workplace, the story goes like this: “If you give a bureaucrat an idea, they will want to slow it down and kill it.”
Bureaucrats can’t help their compulsion to suck the life out of an organization. They do so in the name of protection against risk, threat, and peril.
When you spot a bureaucrat, you can do the team and organization a favor and remind them they don’t have to be that way. Then do your best to avoid them. For bureaucrats, procedure is everything and innovation is nothing.
