Have you walked into your garage or clothes closet or office and suddenly realized things seemed cluttered and out of place? This happens because you didn’t pay attention to your surroundings; you were busy or distracted.
Then, one day, BOOM, it hits you. You’re living in a mess.
With all the changes in the workplace over the past two years, many leaders have largely focused on maintaining the connection with their remote workers while ensuring their safety and well-being.
While this has been necessary, being fully aware of how the changes caused by the pandemic affected your organization as a whole may have gone unnoticed. One of the largest unnoticed effects is redundancy, a leader’s silent enemy.
Redundancy might have especially crept into organizations experiencing profitable growth, with many maintaining a pre-pandemic organizational structure—before remote workers and workforce/supply chain problems became a challenge.
Leadership Tip
Seek out and eliminate redundancies in your area of accountability.
If you think redundancies don’t occur in your organization, you may be kidding yourself. You’re likely not trying hard to find them. So start now to examine roles and responsibilities, marketing efforts, staffing levels, processes, services, meetings, policies and procedures, social media, paperwork, and more.
How can you do this without getting overwhelmed? Select one area first, focus on it, and squeeze out the redundancies as quickly as you can.
What are the benefits of eliminating redundancies? Here are my top three:
- Less confusion and uncertainty lead to greater employee engagement.
- Improved productivity and greater efficiencies result in lower costs.
- Focusing on redundancies can provide new opportunities that help you grow your business.
How about you personally? Are some of your leadership actions and/or activities redundant? Identify them, then take steps to improve those as well.
Redundancy is a leader’s silent enemy (oops, I already said that).
