Opinion: Your company needs a Director of Getting Shit Done

Photo credit: Markus Spiske.

This is the story of a US$200 T-shirt and company systems that went terribly wrong.

Earlier this year, an employee wanted to send a shirt with our logo to a customer as a gift. There was nothing special about this particular shirt. It was an ordinary, 100 percent cotton crew neck. But by the time this employee got approval—factoring in his own time and everyone else’s up the org chart who had to weigh in to validate the request—the cost of this T-shirt had ballooned to US$200 (if not more).

Systems and processes serve an important role in any organization. This is something I’ve realized as my company, Hootsuite, has scaled from a few dozen to nearly 1,000 employees. With that many moving parts, you can’t operate efficiently without a playbook. Systems ensure that projects get done, quality is maintained, and there are no surprises.

But it’s important to distinguish between good systems and bad systems. Good systems make things easier. Bad systems do exactly the opposite. They make everyone’s lives harder. The problem is that bad systems often end up in a kind of corporate Bermuda Triangle where no one really monitors them, and worse, no one is empowered to change them when the need arises.

That’s how we ended up with our T-shirt snafu earlier this year. In our early days, we decided that managers needed to approve requests for company swag—the cost of all those T-shirts and plush toys adds up, after all. But as we grew, this blanket policy became more cumbersome. In the case of the US$200 T-shirt, our senior director of technology, Noel, had to spend several days chasing down his manager, our CTO, to get a rubber stamp on a request for a US$15 gift.

Finding our czar of bad systems

Fortunately, Noel wouldn’t let the issue die. He spent a day or two chasing down the right people in finance and marketing. In the end, he persuaded them to ditch formal approvals in favor of trusting that everyone would use their own discretion when ordering, like grownups. Worst-case scenario: A few extra Hootsuite T-shirts find their way into the world.

This example might sound trivial until you start to do the math. In a company of 1,000 people, we’re talking about hundreds of employee hours saved over a year’s time—just on ordering swag. Once I realized that, the gears started turning. How much time and money was being tied up in other bad and broken processes, simple stuff that was eminently fixable, but that no one was looking into?

And so the “czar of bad systems” role was born. It’s not an official position for us (yet). Noel has been generous enough to volunteer for the first tour of duty, on top of his day job. But our employees now have a go-to person who can take an objective look at processes that have outlived their usefulness. If people have a problem they can’t fix, even with help from their manager, they reach out to the czar. In the past, these processes would have fallen through the cracks, cursed at but ultimately complied with. Now, there’s hope that they might actually be corrected.

In the few months since we’ve anointed our czar, other faulty processes have been zapped in different departments like finance, customer support, and marketing. In the past, for example, our creative team regularly found themselves swamped. Requests from other departments were submitted without clear requirements and urgent projects stalled in a backlog of older briefs. Noel got the stakeholders to sit down and agree to the idea of a dedicated resource manager—someone who could prioritize projects and help our internal team function like a mini creative agency.

Making it work at your company

Our company isn’t necessarily a pioneer in its zeal for eradicating bad systems. Ecommerce giant Shopify actually has an official Director of Getting Sh*t Done, with a team under him that’s tasked with similar efforts. Ombudsmen are a familiar sight in large companies, entrusted with resolving internal issues. And businesses have long turned to strategic consulting firms to help them identify inefficiencies and streamline operations.

But I’d argue that this isn’t just something for big companies and shouldn’t necessarily be left to outside experts. We’re in our early stages with this initiative. But I think we already have some clear takeaways that anyone can apply, regardless of size.

First and foremost, bad processes won’t fix themselves. Often, they lurk in a kind of power vacuum. Frontline employees aren’t empowered to change them. Leadership overlooks the issue or assumes it’s someone else’s problem. Precisely for that reason, it’s key to put someone in charge. This doesn’t have to be an official or full-time role, but employees need to know there’s a go-to person.