How to balance efficiency with relationships

I first read Jeff Sutherland’s book “Scrum: the art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” a few years ago when I was the publisher of a regional group of newspapers. My friend Graham Treakle had recommended it to me, and I read it at the time.

I found the book to be incredibly helpful but unfortunately I did not have much time to act on it at the time. My career took a change, and shortly afterward I started my business.

A few days ago I started listening to the book again, this time on Audiobook. I’m on vacation this week, so I was listening to it as I ran along the beach in the Outer Banks. Vacation time is a good time to relax and be with family. It’s also a good time to think, to step back from your work and take a broader view -- a view that’s very difficult to see when you’re in the trenches daily.

As I was running, I reflected on two of the constant tensions in my business: efficiency and relationships. In recruiting and staffing, we don’t have to worry about purchasing equipment or machinery or worry about inventory control. However, we have to manage our time very carefully.

I often consider our time as our inventory. Wasting time in staffing and recruiting is like a small manufacturer or distributor losing wasting goods to spoilage.

And yet, you need to have deep conversations with candidates, employees, and clients. Try to become too efficient in our industry, and you’ll find yourself not listening or cutting people off before they have something to say. Try to focus just on relationships, and you won’t get anything done.

I have long reflected upon the inefficiency of our largely service economy. Manufacturers have industrial engineers, and there’s a lot of talk there about kaizen and Six Sigma. And yet our offices are often known for being overly inefficient. Generally, the larger the corporation, the more it’s known for being bureaucratic. I suspect we still have much to learn to keep our service and office environments efficient.

Sutherland does a good job addressing both efficiency and people in his book “Scrum,” and notes throughout that the process has been used successfully by all types of organizations and even by the military.

His ideas are very helpful, especially if implemented correctly by corporate America. As I was listening to the book, I thought about how it could help me as a small business owner. It believe it should be helpful to small businesses and to even families.

One of the key concepts of Scrum is to constantly be willing to adapt while completing a project. If something’s not working, then change it. Don’t spend hours, days, and weeks preparing documents for a project and then let the project continue to fail. Be willing to admit that the project isn’t working out or that things aren’t going well, and then adapt.

The corporate world needs be especially attune to the fact that various departments are set up as silos that are built more to compete with each other than to work as a team. This is often a challenge that larger companies are much more likely to face than smaller organizations.

Continue to meet with team members, checking to see what works and what is not working.

Three of the key questions in Scrum are:

What have you completed since the last meeting?

What do you plan to complete by the next meeting?

What is getting in your way?

There’s often a lot of talk about autonomy and empowerment in the workplace today. I agree with that, but it needs to be linked heavily to accountability. And more importantly, it needs to be linked heavily to execution.

Meetings are often viewed as bureaucratic, but also corporations and businesses are often criticized for lack of communication. If you give everyone a task to complete and give them a deadline to handle it, meetings won’t be seen as boring or bureaucratic.

Also, if meetings are to be run with those three questions in mind, then the manager should not be the only person running the meeting. The manager should not see himself or herself as a preacher pounding home a message. Instead, the manager should conduct the meetings as a coordinator, checking to see what everyone has done on their projects and making sure to remove obstacles.

This could potentially involve more meetings, although standing meeting meetings are encouraged. However, meetings can be extremely helpful if they are productive and help a team plan. As motivational speaker and author Brian Tracy has said: “For every minute you spend in planning saves 10 minutes in execution.”

The key word here is execution: our meetings, work and time are wasted if we don’t execute.

This additional planning and efficiency can actually tackle both relationships and efficiency at the same time. We can walk the tightrope and balance both at the same time. The hard part is just becoming accustomed to doing our work a bit differently.