Developing and sustaining efficiency

• With your leader's hat on you need to break old habits, take risks, sustain losses to make gains and abandon old working practices, learn by wasteful trial and error.
• Wearing your managerial hat, you need to be pulling in the opposite direction - getting things right first time, minimizing waste, keeping costs down, simplifying processes and improving quality.
• If you are not personally inclined to wear both hats, how can you ensure that your team as a whole covers both functions?
• The manager's role is that of an efficiency engineer
• Management is like investment - you want the best possible return.
• This means doing all you can to make the most of all your resources.
• Organizations, they say, are now more like organisms than machines.
• But efficiency requires machine-like consistency.
• In fact we need both - hence needing both leaders and managers.
• As a manager, how can you improve the efficiency of your unit?
• What steps can you take to reduce costs, develop smoother running processes, increase productivity or improve quality?
• How can you do more with less? A higher return with a lower investment.
• Investing less cost and energy is just one side of the equation.
• What steps can you take to raise the productivity of your group?
• How can you work smarter, given that you can't work much harder?
• What processes could be re-engineered?
• What precisely do your key stakeholders need from your unit?
• Are you giving what they don't need? Missing what they do need?
• How can you better align your unit to the needs of your customers?
• How can you improve the way you monitor costs and performance?
• How can you maximize efficiency without destroying your leadership agenda of starting all over periodically with something new?
• Although leadership is glamorous, management is just as important.