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Fostering Efficiency

Written by Mitch McCrimmon

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.