What Is a Bureaucracy?

 “Why do I have to take this course? I’ll never use it in the real world.”

Ah, the common lament of the student. While most often heard in high school, I’ve heard various versions throughout college and into graduate school. What I’ve learned since I finished going to school is that we can never know what will be useful in the future. It might be the skills developed while learning to solve math problems or writing a sonnet for a class assignment or a bit of information that is suddenly useful in a job or a human interaction.

There are many examples from my own life. I rarely need to be able to name all fifty states in alphabetical order, but I can when needed because in third grade we performed the song “Fifty Nifty United States” and it stuck.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhDrGnjacv

The lesson that started me thinking about this topic is from graduate school and my course on Administration and Organization. The subject is bureaucracy.

I didn’t find a single positive quote about bureaucracies in either Wikiquotes or Brainy Quotes. Not surprising since it’s a common enough complaint. One day in a workshop session on creativity I asked the team of colleagues about the things that stopped them from being creative and innovative. Bureaucracy as an answer was second only to money. Then I gently reminded this group of university staff that they were the bureaucracy. Of course, that’s the problem, isn’t it. Bureaucracies are made up of people so no matter how efficient a design might be in its pure form, when filled with people, it’s always going to be messy and often inefficient. It can also be immensely effective and responsive to very large problems.

I had the same negative opinion about bureaucracies until that graduate class. It was there that I learned a fundamental concept. Done well, a bureaucracy allows routine matters to be handled routinely by the front-line staff most suited to getting all the usual tasks done. This allows time for non-routine matters to be handled by more senior staff with the time, experience, and authority to make exceptions, call other offices, and generally unsnarl the complexities of processes gone wrong.

As a vice president of large complex Student Affairs divisions, I couldn’t be everywhere or see every task that was being done. I didn’t try to. Instead, I saw it as my job to make sure staff had the knowledge, skill, and resources to do their jobs effectively. It was also critical that everyone shared a common understanding about our purpose as an organization and the values that underlaid every job and process. When that all worked, I didn’t need to be everywhere or worry about the “Student Experience” because several hundred people through multiple offices and programs were making sure students had what they needed to have a good experience. There was a complex, interconnected bureaucracy, in other words, a large group of talented people, working to make sure things functioned as they should.

Healthy bureaucracies are filled with knowledgeable, experienced people who know how to make the organization work for the benefit of the people (both internal and external to the organization) it was designed to serve. Healthy organizations are designed to change when needed and to support people in making that change.

Yes, it’s true that there isn’t much more frustrating than a poorly designed organization filled with poorly trained, low morale people. Yes, it’s true that an unhealthy organization can become stagnant, unable to change to meet current needs. But, I’d argue both of these issues are often a leadership failures rather than failures of the organizational staff or the organizational design.

I’ve been thinking about this topic today as I watch the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy. I know everyone has a horrible story about working with the federal and state bureaucracies, though when you think about the sheer number of transactions, decisions, actions, and people involved, the reality is that for most people, most of the time, they do what they are supposed to do – provide services to people across the country and manage an immense variety of needs. Are there places where things should be more efficient? Of course. Are there people who are unhappy in their jobs and do them poorly? Certainly.

But I am also sure there are many unsung bureaucrats who are doing their jobs well with little or no fanfare, because after all, a bureaucracy is only as good as the people who are part of it. As an example, in September 2024, The Washington Post ran a story about a government engineer who has made coal mining safer for miners. It’s worth the time.  https://longreads.com/2024/09/05/the-canary/

In a complex world, it’s important to understand how things work. I encourage you to think about the organizations you are part of, the services you or your family depend on, and all of the different staff who work together to keep organizations running. We may fret about bureaucracy, but many of us are the bureaucracy in our organizations and as we go through our days, all of us depend on the smooth interconnectedness of the work done by a large number of people who are good at their jobs – in other words, well-functioning, healthy bureaucracies.

Take care,

Gage