Bureaucracy to Humanocracy

 Bureaucracy to Humanocracy 

The organisations are operating by following the bureaucratic structure of reporting, delegations of power to take the decisions etc., where the system decides the level and quality of contribution of the people in any organisation. My informal studies of use of human potentials in organisations basically based on interactions with leaders, CEOs, Manageng Directors, Managers, Heads etc. in India is maximum 30 – 35 %, 10-20% of the people are fully utilised by the organisations naturally and others get the scope to utilise their originality from 10%-50% based onn the nature of job and industries. In knowledge industries, it is little more, as structure is more flat and in other industries it is very less after a certain level because of very long structure of reporting and compliances systems are very high. 

Lots of studies and case studies are made on optimum utilisations of human resources in different industries and published in different online publication sources particularly, after covid19, where we are talking about new normal, human centric sensible system etc. 

In 1994, Steve Jobs once said in Rolling Stone Interview, 

 “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them. It’s not the tools that you have faith in — tools are just tools. They work, or they don’t work. It’s people you have faith in or not.”

The prospective clearly says that it is the human potential, who makes the difference not the machine. Machine may or may not work, the trust for the people works. Tools may fail, with change of situation, environment, but human being evolves with the change. 

Peter Drucker in most of the studies has focused on very less intervention of supervisors on the workers or contributors and always had given utmost importance to the human centric model driven by knowledge, emotions and will power. According to him the number of supervisors should be maximum one third in number than the contributors in line.

Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini have recently published one book in August, 2020 Humanocracy, where authors have tried to bring their insights on human potentials, its maximum utilisation for growth of the organisation or system. 

Gary Hamel in an conversation with Executive Editor of Mckency in February,2021 said, the organisations till now designed to engage maximum 15% of its employees to their fullest potentials and 30 % of the employees bring their originality and creation into the job. Now time has come, we all should think about the institutions, the systems, structured to use maximum human potentials. The engagement of 70% employees’ potentials in bureaucratic compliances should be relooked. “Our goal is to move from a bureaucratic model that is focused on maximizing compliance to one that is focused on maximizing contribution.”

Michele Zanini said, we have interacted with the managers and frontline executives of large organisation, where those people do all sorts of entrepreneurial job like designing their own equipment, deciding contracts, making job schedule etc. But after discussing with all of them, it was clear that the number of compliances have increased substantially in last two decades resulting doubling the number of managers in USA organisations, where the growth of employees in all other sectors is around 40%. 

This is a call for the Heads, CEOs, Managing Directors, Leaders to think about their, goal, purpose, talents of their team members, creating  opportunities to trap the potentials rather wasting it in compliances. 

In large organisations the level of Bureaucracy is much more than the small organisations. In large organisations to make it more human centric, the heads should be empowered to play the entrepreneurial role .  Online compliances have increased the documentation and compliance process more stringent, static, very less sensible, which should be relooked to have more easier system for human intervention and resolve the issue by taking sensible decisions.