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We live in a time when bureaucratic mismanagement is beating the heck out of the American Dream.

Though there are notable exceptions, those who run things are increasingly devoted to everything but how best to get their job done. Witness the lack of meaningful accountability for those who break our laws, violate our borders, waste our tax dollars, involve us in foolish foreign entanglements, and otherwise mock everything our country is about.

Those who still get the American deal and wonder how their company, business, agency, or other organized entity stacks up on the feckless bureaucracy scale can look for a few telltale signs:

Topping the list would be leadership that attempts to conceal the fact that their number one job is to preserve themselves.

Another classic would be heavy-handed management where centralized control enthusiasms smother innovation, productivity, and morale.

Still another indicator is a ‘squeaky wheel’ problem-solving model that reactively paints over its own rust and pretends success.

Perhaps the simplest way to test your team’s metal is self-comparison to how most governmental organizations are run. The FBI, CIA, DOE, CDC, DOJ, and U.S. Customs and Border Protections are good places to start.

If you’re doing it their way, you either have a lot of money to waste, think paper mâché umbrellas make good sense, or both.

If you’re not doing it their way, here’s ten contrarian management tips on how to not do it their way even better:   

• Never put customers first – If you’re not giving proper consideration to customers, employees, managers, and owners – all at the same time – you’re undercutting somebody. Business is a team sport – over time everyone rises or falls together.

• Steering strictly from above is lazy leadership – Taking a ‘questions down and answers up’ approach is a much better strategy. The people closest to the working reality have the best understanding of the problems and the solutions. The final decisions may come from above, but not without first drawing from those with the real answers.

• Communication is an overrated concept – Most communications are little more than non-productive exercises in social masturbation. Intentional contact that is purposeful, productive, positive, and petite is a much better investment of time, energy, and resources

• Don’t treat people as disposable objects – Taking care of your employees is a best way to take care of your company. Smart companies go out of their way to make employees feel they matter; uplift everyone to their fuller potentials; and attempt to salvage those who lose their way.

• Bad performers should be culled from a company for the same reason low cards are discarded from a poker hand – Having exhausted efforts to uplift a marginal employee, it’s time to let that employee go. You do that for the same reason you don’t run on a flat tire with the assumption your good tires will get you where you’re going.

• If you are not setting goals, attaching accountability, and measuring results in a positive fashion, you’re not managing your company – Goals, accountability, and measurements are more surely the enemies of bureaucracy than boring make-work. These three simple tools extinguish bureaucrats, predators, and deadbeats while fostering clarity, growth, and achievement.

• Group meetings are as useful to productivity as a recliner is useful to cardiovascular health – Most group meetings are (1) too long (2) boringly pretensive and (3) indulgent vanity exercises more likely to demotivate, drain, and discourage than produce anything close to a reasonable return on investment. This is extra-especially true of virtual meetings.

• Money doesn’t even make the top five list of long-term employee performance motivators — Employee enthusiasm for a raise is shorter lived than a BMW’s new car smell. Money matters, but an opportunity to feel valued, grow, create, contribute, and be a part of something positive and good has a far more lasting motivational impact.

• Anyone expecting employees to work harder than managers is not a good manager – A manager’s most powerful teaching/motivational tools are their (1) example and (2) love for their employees. Leave either one out, and the time bomb starts ticking. Those with the most vested interest in the company’s success (managers/owners) will or should work harder than their employees and – yes – love and caring about the people who work for you is a management skill.

• Making money is not your company’s number one job – Being useful is your number one job. If you’re useful, you will succeed, grow, and make money.

So, there it is – 10 ways to make sure any organization with you on board doesn’t melt into yet another mismanaged bureaucratic morass.

But don’t stop here. Think of your own ideas on how to improve things, put those thoughts to paper and pass it on to someone who seems to have an interest in doing things better.