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PRINCIPLE THREE: Create a More Responsive and Flattened Bureaucracy with Fewer Layers Between Decision Makers and Front-Line Workers

When some government agencies have five or more organizational layers separating a field office from headquarters, and when others have a manager for every four or five front-line workers, service delivery is bound to slow down, cost more money, carry more overhead and create red tape. It's what the Brookings Institution meant when it described how managers gum up the public sector and hamstring front-line workers by writing so many "elaborate rules" that the result is "a thicket of agency-specific housekeeping regulations and standard operating procedures."

Sanitation workers and tree trimmers ask why their daily routes are devised by managers who have never been on a truck. Hospital workers can't understand why procedural rules force them to find a supervisor before cleaning an overflowing toilet. Almost every front-line public employee wonders why routine requisition forms must sit for weeks on a manager's desk. Few things demoralize front-line workers more than unnecessary rules and excessive bureaucracy.

Nor is this problem limited to the public sector. Some private companies trace their difficulties to a management structure in which decision makers sit in corporate offices far removed from the work they manage. The Big Three automakers made workplace restructuring an integral part of their recovery. They reduced the layers of management, and through bargaining with the United Auto Workers, gave front-line employees more responsibility for product quality and how work is performed. Others have followed a similar path.

"It began with delayering," said the president of SmithKline Beecham at a forum on reinventing government, when asked about the transformation of his pharmaceutical company. "Middle management as a percent of total employees has been taken down. And the way we have done that is by increasing the span of control, and by eliminating what we call smokestack reporting relationships, or one-on-one reporting relationships.... The employees of our company are empowered to look at the things that they do, make recommendations, and improve the function of all the processes of their daily work."

It is becoming a cardinal rule of any organization, public or private: the more layers of management, the more rules there are to follow, and the fewer resources available for the workers who actually perform on the job. For government to eliminate waste and save money, it must flatten the bureaucracy and give front-line workers the latitude to make decisions and the authority to act on them.

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