Being Efficient Is Not The Same As Being Effective
Understanding their underlying difference so you can thrive as a Manager
I n the corporate world, the word “efficiency” is praised as some sort of magic elixir that will bring whatever results we desire whenever we use it.
Business leaders left and right are focused so much on being efficient that you hear it in almost every interaction. Whether you are sitting through team meetings, company-wide announcements about quarterly and yearly objectives, or anything else, efficiency is one word that stands out.
- Improve operational efficiency
- Being more efficient as a team
- Making our processes more efficient
are some of the phrases that you often hear.
But what is efficiency?
In short, efficiency is the state in which an activity is being carried out to its maximum output using the minimum amount of resources possible.
In other words, being efficient means doing more with less. The resources within business environments are primarily concerned with money, time, and energy.
Having its roots in the age of Taylorism as well as lasting throughout the last half century up until now, efficiency aimed at increasing productivity while simultaneously reducing resources — and it achieved that at excellent scales.
However, two major reasons are causing business leaders to rethink the way of doing things:
- Side effects that surfaced when it was attempted to impose efficiency on people followed by their consequences could not have been considered at the time (although when Taylorism was introduced plenty of people rebelled).
- The world has evolved at such frantic pace that innovation has pushed the boundaries of reality and made everything interconnected. Complex multi-faceted systems that intersect digital and physical domains have emerged meaning that our ways of work have to change.
The drawbacks with efficiency
Even though this approach has generated generous profits for companies all over the world, and even though it is an approach that is still needed in today’s landscape, there are significant drawbacks that are worth addressing.
Dehumanisation of workers
To begin with, there is a negative effect on people. Efficiency works best when applied on machines. When it comes to humans, not so much. When we reduce everything down to efficiency, we remove all sorts of creative and critical thinking from the actors carrying out their activities because the task is designed in such approach that it has to be executed in one specific way to consume the least amount of resources. Consequently, motivational factors are concerned only with monetary goals which is well known that are not very sustainable in the long run.
Reducing the probability of innovation
Having tasks designed to be carried out in one particular way day in day out leaves little room for imagination. And that’s ok because parts of our work have much benefit to gain from such approach. But using this framework for pretty much everything means that the probability of something improving is very low.
That’s because improvement relies on innovation, and innovation relies on thinking out of the box, and thinking out of the box is a risky endeavour. Risky endeavours require people to take initiatives and try new things.
Compartmentalisation
To design tasks to be carried out in certain ways means that they have to be categorised respectively. That leads to siloed departments throughout organisations that have narrow guidelines regarding task execution, and staff that is trained accordingly so they are as versed as possible in following those guidelines.
Therefore what you end up having is information that stays within each department and is never nurtured into something bigger.
A new approach: being effective
Throughout my professional career I’ve noticed that the best results I had were produced by trying to be effective in regards to the outcome I wanted to achieve, rather than trying to do things as efficiently as possible.
To me this comes as no surprise.
Change your mentality
By adopting a mentality where effectiveness is the means of achieving your goals, everything changes because the origin of the perspective is drastically altered.
What I mean by that is that you approach each situation, each task, and each element in your project or your work with the end goal in mind. And as such, you ask questions such as:
- How can I achieve the best possible results?
- How can my team help to achieve this?
- How can we be effective as a whole in order to bring in the desired results?
Immediately the narrative changes from how to produce more with less into how can I deliver the best results possible.
This perspective is closely tied with having a benefit-centric approach, it is value driven — meaning that the end goal is to deliver maximum value to our customers — , it is taking in consideration at a large extent the human factor, and is not purely focused on machines and tools.
The last point is particularly important because the people factor is taking more and more of a centre role in our projects as time passes. We’ve moved from the industrial age of machinery and large factory plants to the era of innovation, critical thinking, and creative approaches.
And as such, being effective is the way forward for handling our teams.
Being effective is all about the human factor
Each one of us is unique in their own way. Therefore we carry out tasks differently. A graphic designer for example may need more time to complete the same task than their colleague. But their end result may differ.
Or consider the possibility where one day you may have people on your team that are having a rough time. Perhaps their child is sick, or their refrigerator broke down and they need to get a new one, or literally anything else.
The call for empathy
Being effective is all about being close to your team and being empathetic with them. If a member of yours is having a tough day and you want to speak to them, you don’t know how much time you will need. You can’t put that activity into a timebox and say “ok we’ll sort this out from 09:30 to 10:00 then get on with my day”.
It calls for deeper empathy and to invest time with each one of your colleagues. You must be genuine and must want to achieve great results together for the benefit of everyone.
So immediately, instead of thinking in terms of spending an x amount of time on one task and then moving to the next, you focus on bringing in the desired results out of each situation. This accumulates into having the best end result possible.
The issue I am highlighting in this article is not the fact that efficiency is not working or that it is evil, but rather the fact that we have to rethink the way we work and start changing our methods.
By infusing our methodologies with sensibility towards our teams, and by placing the human factor at the centre of our perspective, we put the focus on the elements that are the key contributors to our results: our fellow team members.