How many of you have a boss who stresses that you not waste time? Or talks about being efficient? Or is a clock watcher? Why do business people stress this?

The business world treats efficiency and effectiveness as one and the same thing. And they couldn’t be more wrong.

Efficiency is all about eliminating or reducing unproductive actions. Breaks, lunch, admin actions, and conversations amongst coworkers are examples of what businessy people call inefficient behavior. If we were robots or slaves they would be right. Business folks think efficiency is, or maybe (I’ll give them some credit) produces effectiveness. The trouble is that the quality of work and the overall quantity of actions we take are not correlated. We are not robots.

In contrast, effectiveness is all about the quality or impact of what we do. It focuses on the results and seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms that produce the desired outcomes.

It may come to you as a surprise, but some activities are effective because they are inefficient. The military comes to mind as a perfect example. An efficient army would never be ready, since it would only train the minimum necessary for the perceived need. It couldn’t be proactive, because that kind of speculation is a type of waste – it’s planning for something that may not happen. That wouldn’t be efficient.

A focus on effectiveness doesn’t mean ignoring the value of efficiency; it means recognizing that efficiency is only a component of optimizing a system – and it is never the most important thing. It is a means, not an end.

Why does this matter and why am I writing about it? Because making efficiency an end in itself dehumanizes your subordinates. It treats their humanity as a nuisance, something that gets in the way of getting things done.

So how do we acknowledge the humanity of our people but still be effective in our work? That’ll be for next week – I’ll go over how to measure effectiveness and why it’s tempting to replace it with efficiency.