1.
CUT DOWN ON APPROVALS

As soon as one person has to ask another person for an approval, a hierarchy is created. No company can survive without such hierarchies, without checks and balances, without managers and managees.

But the more of these you create, the more your company splits into two camps — them and us, ins and outs, favored and unfavored.

Eliminate as many of these approval steps as possible.

Start with the demeaning ones, the ones that require people to get approval to spend the company’s money — travel vouchers, expense reports, overtime authorizations, and so on.

Every time a person has to ask for such an approval, his or her self-image is damaged, since it says very clearly to everyone that the approver is more responsible and more trustworthy than the approvee.

And this of course is elitist rot.

Just because a person has more authority does not mean he or she is more responsible. Indeed, an argument could be made to the contrary — that the more authority people have, the less responsibly they often behave. (“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power…”)

Because such a policy treats some people like employees and others like employers, it perpetuates the myth that some people are employees and others are employers. In truth, none of them (unless he or she owns the company) is either. Together they are the company.65

And you should do everything in your power to make sure that everybody — the managers, the receptionists, everybody — feel that they are the company. Not employees of the company. The company itself.

Requiring them to get an approval to spend what is, in effect, their own money hardly nurtures such a feeling. Instead it destroys it.

Incidentally, this is not some naive scheme that will wreck your company. It’s a practical way to run a business. I’ve seen it work. I ran (oops — ideaized) a creative department quite successfully for over fifteen years based at least partly on the belief that the way to make people trustworthy is to trust them.

During that time I never checked an expense account.

I told the people I worked with that making them come to me for an approval irked me because it insulted their honesty. I told them that I trusted them not to rip me off, and I simply signed their expense reports without looking at them.

Certainly a few people took advantage of me. But our loss in money paled in comparison to their gain in self-image and resultant better work.