What are the costs of “efficiency”?

Mission vs. Efficiency

Leadership Efficiency can be costly to the sustainability of an organization. Efficiency is addictive. As coaches at CO2 Partners, we often see organizations, divisions, groups, departments, and teams fall in love with totally efficient, systematic approaches.  They all watch the dashboard of indicators to monitor the efficiency of the business. In the process, however, they take their eyes off the organization’s mission.

When you strive for efficiency and numbers and growth, you can lose your sense of purpose. The goal of any business is to serve its customer in a way that provides distinctive value. Leadership efficiency can lead you in the other direction. It might tempt you to pump air into your brand of ice cream or to shrink the packaging–or both. The more value you remove, however, the more likely your customers are to notice and to stop buying.

Once an organization has lost its mission and gone out of alignment, it’s difficult to recover. An organization is not a back. Once it’s out of alignment, one small adjustment won’t bring it into alignment. If it took years for the organization to become unaligned, it may take years to get it back into alignment.

Get started now. Your mission and vision must be clear, authentic, and compelling–something strong enough to withstand the allure of leadership efficiency. Strong enough so that each employee in marketing, operations, finance, customer service, and research all understand what the guiding light is for the organization.

What distinctive value can and must you provide to your customers, no matter what the cost?