How To Infect Your Team With Professional Laziness

Adding value and becoming indispensable only works if you can motivate your team to do the same.

Capitalism in a?nutshell

Adam Smith, the 18th-century philosopher and father of modern economics, said: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their interest.”

Most companies I have worked for are for-profit public companies that aim to maximise profit and minimise costs. Labour productivity is usually measured in terms of busyness -so firing employees who are not busy and transferring their responsibilities to others seems logical to eliminate slack and costly resources.

The problem of?scale

Adam Smith’s philosophy is well-suited for small enterprises, where the owner is the direct beneficiary of efficient and profitable practices.

When a company has tens, hundreds, or thousands of employees, it is difficult for individuals to see their contribution to maximising profitability. Investors wish to use every asset efficiently, maximising utility.

Unfortunately, this motivates everyone to look busy, eliminating the potential for productive and profitable process change without adding more resources?—?a lose-lose outcome.

Because I have a low boredom threshold and seek to delegate monotonous tasks so I can move on to something new, I have not suffered the consequences of the Peter principle by reaching my level of incompetence.

Delegating my responsibilities so I could focus on new opportunities worked.

I know many who have, and I feel sorry for their families who must tolerate being second in their life priorities.

Creating capacity for maximising profitability

I have written many times about my strategy of adding value by taking on projects that added 5 to 10 times my loaded costs to the bottom line—in addition to my primary responsibilities. This strategy worked because it gave me the freedom to act.

I have also detailed how changing business processes can increase team productivity. A good example is the transition from?Waterfall?to?Agile?project management, which has improved productivity fourfold in large-scale software development.

Similarly, dividing up the software team budget into operations, support, research, and development developed future-ready capacity, which has always delivered long-term value.

I have realised only recently that the same principles apply to business administration.

When I took over managing my Irish business eight years ago, I was busy with my US and Bolivian operations. Still, I agreed to allocate 10 hours weekly to managing the business.?

I set up the same financial management process of a single sheet with every month’s revenue and expenses segmented yearly so I could immediately see the state of the business at any time. I have been doing this for many years with other companies. Recently, in a discussion with my office manager, we discussed that although we had reduced costs in terms of offices and changed work-from-home policies, instant visibility enabled her to do her job in half the time?—?creating capacity for change.

None of the above efficient resource utilisations drove me to fire people, as those remaining would cease collaborating on productivity gains. A better solution was to use the capacity created for expansion and change.

In one case, I doubled capacity at a PC manufacturer in Ireland, which enabled us to enter two new markets without hiring additional resources.

Conclusion

My collaborative leadership style was my choice; others with more aggressive and abusive styles thrived in the short term.

In the future, when all jobs are impacted by productivity tools supported by large language models, the element of choice will vanish, and effective integration of new ways of working will be necessary for the survival of owners, leaders, and employees.?

Professional laziness facilitates learning and development across every business, maximising profitability.

AI will result in traditional managers being relegated to the flightless birds of history, which will likely be displayed alongside the Dodo in natural history museums.