The Approval Step Nobody Built
You're about to ask for another hire. You've got the deck, the business case, the at-capacity language ready to go. But before you send that request, there's a question that's harder to answer than the headcount number. How many steps in your process exist because they were added in 2019 and nobody has questioned them since? I've walked through operations where a $200 vendor invoice went through four approval layers. Four. Each one added a person's name to a document. Each one added a day to the cycle. And when you ask who actually needs to see this before it goes out, the answer, more often than not, is nobody. The step didn't fail. It just never had a job.
The Step Is Not the System
Here's the distinction that changes how you look at your org chart. An approval step is not the same thing as a control. A control exists to prevent a specific, named risk. Finance reviews vendor invoices over $500. That's a control. The VP signs off on all purchase orders regardless of amount. That's a step. One is doing work. The other is a person's name on a form. When I sit down with a leadership team and we go through their order-to-cash process line by line, the pattern is consistent. The steps that survive scrutiny are the ones where you can name the risk they prevent. The ones that don't survive are the ones where the answer to what goes wrong if this person doesn't see this is nothing, we just always did it. That's not a process. It's a tradition, and traditions don't scale. They just get more expensive.
The Headcount Math Changes
Now here's where it gets uncomfortable. When you pull those unnecessary steps out of the equation, the headcount math changes in a way that's hard to argue with. You thought you needed two more accountants because the volume was too high. But the volume wasn't the problem. Every invoice was getting routed through a manager review that added three days of idle time per transaction. Remove the step, and the same two people clear the queue in half the time. You just didn't need to ask for the hire in the first place. And that's the part that stings, because the request for the new person was the easier conversation. Pointing at your own process and saying this step is doing no work is the harder one. It means looking at the org chart and asking the question that makes the room go quiet.
The One That's Still There
But here's the edge case that keeps me up. Sometimes the step isn't decoration. Sometimes it's a person's only reason to feel like their role matters. I've been in the room where a process owner hears this step can go and their face does something complicated. Because for them, that step is the proof they're needed. And now you're asking them to remove their own proof. That's not an operations problem anymore. It's a people problem wearing an operations costume. You can't cut your way through it with a process diagram. You can only walk into that conversation knowing the step is doing no work, and then decide what you owe the person who built their identity around it. That decision doesn't have a clean answer. It just has a cost, and the cost of not having the conversation is the one you're already paying.
