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As important as your systems and processes are for your success, your customers don’t care about them. They care about getting quality products and services delivered in an honest, ethical manner. It’s your job as a leader to create systems and processes to improve a customer’s experience and get maximum engagement from your human workers. Simplicity is one true way to ensure your systems and processes can support the people. You can simplify your business in six ways.

Be sure every process and rule you have in place, every decision you make, aligns with your company’s purpose and mission. Why do you do the things you do? If something doesn’t align with your company’s purpose and mission, either stop it or change it. This means asking tough and sometimes painful questions, but it must be done.

Make it easy to do business with you. Simplify the processes for your customers to deal with you and simplify the internal processes that are in place to serve your customers. For example, make it easy for customers to contact you and empower your people to do what’s necessary to respond to them.

Eliminate redundancy. Look for places where multiple people are doing the same function and consolidate and streamline if you can. Of course, you need backups and cross-training, but cut out superfluous functions.

Eliminate unnecessary meetings and bureaucracy. Be sure every meeting is necessary and give people permission not to go to a meeting when their presence is not productive. If you don’t know the reason for a process, figure it out—and if it’s not required, stop doing it.

Look at every position, understand the greater need, ask tough questions, and keep positions fluid. Often, we get comfortable with positions in a company and don’t even think to ask if there is a way to add technology and utilize this person or position for another more important role that aligns with the company’s mission. As your mission, technology, and customers’ needs evolve, so will your staff’s roles, job descriptions, and expectations of their performance.

Assess how you as the leader are spending your time. Be sure that your time is spent working on the business, not in the business. Leaders should spend their time doing things that are strategic, innovative, mission-driven, creating value for their customers and employees, solving complex problems and creating a culture rich in communication and collaboration spanning across the enterprise.

Think about the Ten Commandments. When Jesus was asked which was the most important commandment, He said:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. —Matthew 22:37–39 (NIV)

It really is that simple—in life and in business. But no organization, no business, naturally drifts toward simplicity as it grows. It will only get more complex. What we must do as leaders is examine what we’re doing in the organization, understand the why, and simplify everywhere we can.