It’s all about increasing your understanding about how things work and increasing your
ability to use your time effectively
We often hear a whole lot of those boring and standard dialogs “get things done, be efficient, be proactive, we must take the organization to next level and blah… blah…” And when you hear the same dialog 100 th times, a voice comes from inside “Bullshit”. Why these headless people keep on beating the bush without having even the basic understanding of how things work? Working on any external aspect does little good in long run if you fail to understand, examine and work on its root. And the root is increasing your ability use your time effectively.
People who aspire to be an effective entrepreneurs or leader, there is a lot to learn from others mistakes; you just need to have an eye and ear to see and hear. If you have any influence in organization at any level or in any capacity, I invite you test your organizational culture against the following points.
1- Working hard is a misguided fallacy…
Certain business leaders mistakenly believe that making people work hard and keeping them busy equals to productivity. Really!!! They must check if that hard work is really translating into productivity. May be someone is doing this just to hide his inefficiencies? At
some point of time we all have seen organizations encourage this behaviour by appreciating people who work long hours and always ready to come on weekends and holidays. They fail to understand that even in the industrial era of rote factory work, this was untrue. It is a misguided fallacy, and expensive too. Perhaps they don’t believe that Less stress produces more efficiency, less absenteeism, greater balance, happy and loyal people.
If someone says he loves to spend more time in office, you need to check if things are really okay at his end? No one in this world would tell on his deathbed that “I wish I could have spent more time in office”. There are times when our jobs demand extra efforts and time, once in a while and that is absolutely fine and can’t be denied, but when it becomes norm, a habit then there is something to look into. In today’s world it’s not enough to be busy; technology is very much capable to assist you in what keeps you busy. Technology has progressed to a level where repetitive tasks can be automated and technology & machines can be deployed to do it.
The first step towards becoming an efficient organization is to find out all the busy people
and hard working people. Perhaps they need your help; you as a leader need to guide them
to go easy and not to struggle and this can be done by following:
- Train people if they lack skills to do the work efficiently
- Introspect the organization culture, there could be some detrimental factors that are affecting peoples performance
- Empower them with tools and technology to produce better results
- Listen people and try to understand their perspective, thereby getting a broader picture and far more objective view.
Don’t be busy. Just be productive.
2- Leave things undone
Lin Yutang once said “Practice the noble art of leaving things undone”. Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials. It is imperative to analyse and check what is essential and what not. And if you really have a big list of things to do every day then always take the next important thing to do. If you don’t prioritize the tasks based on their importance you will end up leaving the important works undone. The second important thing must be done is you must delegate. Delegate the less important works to your subordinates or colleagues. You must rather focus only on those tasks which can’t be done by others.
“Goal should no longer be to get more done, but rather to have less to do”. This will bring ease and quality in what you do.
3- Right people in the right job
Each and every individual is unique in his own way and capacity. Identifying this uniqueness and bringing out this unrecognized power and disowned potentials in people is the real art a leader can have. If you are really interested in making an organization effective and efficient, you must learn this art. When you do that you can assign jobs to people not based on their rank and position, but on their ability and interest to do a particular job, this will significantly increase people’s productivity and achievements. Assigning right people on the right is paramount. A monkey is best performer in the trees but you need a fish in water.
4- Leverage Technology
Accelerate human achievement through technology. Ultimately it is achieved by the people. Organizational efficiency is an organization's degree of success in utilizing the least possible inputs in order to produce the greatest possible outputs. In today’s world tools and technology plays an essential role in the efficiency and effectiveness of a company. By working with different professionals you can you can leverage their expertise to analyze your business and obtains new ideas to help reduce costs, improve the product and provide quality customer service. By work with technological professionals you can determine the best software solutions required to suit your business needs, strategic design, protect the business, improve customer satisfactions
without exceeding a set budget
