As managers we want efficiency. In fact, as managers, ensuring efficiency is our job. The problem is, at pm eleast as it relates to people, efficiency has connotations of timing people performing tasks with a stopwatch and cutting bout those who cannot produce X number of widgets beenjv in an hour. When the topic of efficiency is brought up, usually with someone whose area is NOT showing to be efficient, the response is usually “Yeah, well, that is why I focus on effectiveness. I’m a leader, not a manager!” Good for you, but if you are strictly focused on “effectiveness,” you could be pissing your profits away with ineffective systems. If you are going to be successful in business, being efficient is critical. If you are a leader, but efficiency isn’t at the center of your way of doing business, you are not going to be effective.

Efficiency must play a critical role in your work as a manager and leader, but if that is your battle cry, you may find yourself losing both the efficiency battle and the effectiveness war, because people are, well, people. You see effectiveness as a way to better manage and obtain better profits, which leads to a bigger pot for everyone. Your employees see efficiency as doing their job and getting paid. You do what is needed as quickly as possible, punch your clock, and go home. In an environment where efficiency is all that is preached, they may just see themselves as cogs in a wheel, as a means to an end, i.e., a bigger payday for the executives.

If you treat your employees under the purview of efficiency, they will treat their jobs with efficiency as well, meaning that they will jump for the next dollar. Face it, if I am making $15 at Job A, and I can make $16 at Job B, it is inefficient for me to stay at Job A.

So how do you move away from the efficiency dialog, without becoming, well, inefficient? How do you become effective through efficiency?

You stop treating your employees as a commodity, which means you stop focusing solely on the work that they are performing, and you look at them as a whole person, and you adjust your approach to that person.

“Ugh! I don’t have time to coddle these snowflakes!” you are saying right now. “They just need to leave their personal crap at the door and do their jobs!” I am not disagreeing with you, but if you take that approach, I might advise a sign for the employee entrance that reads: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

On the other hand, setting efficiency aside for a minute and working with your employees to understand them and what is going on in their world – to genuinely understand what is important to them – will, wait for it… enable you to maximize their efficiency.

I am not advocating that you be the best of chums. Just understand that people are driven by dissimilar needs and wants – the 25-year-old Admin who lives with his parents while finishing his degree has unique needs and wants than a 50-year-old engineer with a mortgage, two kids in college, and a boat. It may be hard to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, but you must at least acknowledge that there is a different pair of shoes in the office, and your feet will either cramp up or get blisters if you try wearing them for long.

Does this mean we should throw out the efficiency dialog altogether? Of course not! As I said earlier, if you are not making efficiency a priority, you are at best limiting your organization’s success, if not failing miserably. But it should be couched in the context of “we want to be as efficient as possible to attain an effective output.” Communications with your team members should never lean towards the most efficient means possible. Instead, it should be focused on the fact that they are people, and as sad as it is to admit, people are not always efficient.