Important Reminders that Less Can Be More

In leadership, subtraction can be its own reward.

I recently received two reminders that less can be more from The Wall Street Journal: “Bosses Promise Jobs with a Coveted Perk: Boundaries” by Lindsay Ellis and “Why Bosses Should Ask Employees to Do Less—Not More” by Robert I. Sutton.

Ellis tackles a subject of increasing importance to leaders over the last few years: work-life balance – or, as my Tompkins Leadership colleague Julio Neto calls it “life balance.” Ellis’ article quotes numerous leaders, employees and potential employees to respect and enforce work-life boundaries.

This drive by leaders not to burn out their employees is essential. After all, Harvard Business Review reports that employee burnout costs organizations $125 billion to $190 billion a year in healthcare spending, and that doesn’t include the costs of lower productivity and higher turnover.

Yes, many organizations need to worry about The Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting. But you and I know that high-performing organizations still attract talent that wants to work, wants to succeed and wants to make a difference. Often, such talent needs to be reminded to take a break – for their own good and for the organization’s future.

Piling on Work Often Creates Poor Results

For his part, Sutton’s article summarizes a lengthy body of research that shows how humans (bosses and workers) tend to equate adding more – more staff, software, meetings, rules, training – with creating success. Often, more just creates more bloat, bureaucracy, complexity and burnout.

His point is not that organizations need to do less, but that removing the unimportant excess frees your staff to spend more time on complex, important tasks.

So, yes, less can be more.

This is near and dear to my heart because it’s reminiscent of the Pareto Principle, a tenet of my industrial engineering education at Purdue University. In manufacturing (and many other venues of life) you can correct 80% of the errors by fixing 20% of the causes.

Making sure your staff can concentrate on the vital few instead of the unnecessary many could be the key to success.

So the next time your organization hits a bump in the road, a thorny problem or an immovable bottleneck, the answer, perhaps, is to take a step back, remove some rules, and subtract instead of add.