One of my early observations in management was that managers always want to be seen doing something. If they run out of things to do, they start working on how to change their organization. This, of course, drives their staff crazy since their staff wants to get their work done, not work on the manager’s latest scheme for changes. I remember often being very happy when the managers were so involved with some big project or issue that they weren’t constantly changing direction on us. It gave us a chance to finish the assigned work and start to think about a long term strategy.  When managers change things constantly it becomes very difficult for the staff to get the work done.

Mind you, I am not saying that managers should never change things. The business environment is always changing and that necessitates that businesses and individual departments change. What I am saying is that changes should be well thought out, as limited in scope as possible, and occasional. Anyone who has been at a business that reorganizes yearly knows the disruption the changes have on staff.   

I am told that in some cultures, a new manager’s job is to keep things going as they were—to keep the ship steady. That’s certainly not the case with any company I’ve worked for in the USA. Each new manager wants to prove they are worthy of the job, and they quickly undertake trying to solve every problem they’ve seen.

Related to this is a sense many managers have that staff should always be ‘doing something’. There is this general feeling that if people are idle then it’s a big problem with the system and needs a solution. Obviously, having people idle too much of the time is an inefficient use of resources, but the Theory of Constraints shows that changing a system because people are idle will likely only make the process worse, unless you’ve carefully studied the process and are relieving the bottleneck.

Take a doctor’s office: in most doctor’s offices you wait around until they are finally ‘ready’ for you and then you are ushered into an exam room. There they might take some basic information or vital signs from you, but then you wait, often for quite some time, for the doctor to come in. This wait time is not a flaw in the system; it is actually a carefully thought-out strategy to ensure that the doctor, the most scarce resource and critical bottleneck, is used as efficiently as possible. While many people, especially the patient, end up sitting around doing nothing for a long time in this set up, the one person who always has something to do is the doctor. Efficiency depends on key resources, in this case the doctor, being used as efficiently as possible, with the other pieces of the system (people and processes) having the main job of setting the conditions for the key resource to be efficient.

Imagine some new manager coming into the doctor’s office. They look at all the time customers and staff spend sitting around and they realize that there are two or three times as many exam rooms as doctors. They quickly reduce the number of exam rooms, thus saving rent by using space ‘more efficiently’. This set up would actually be far less efficient. The doctor would have to wait as each new patient got settled and their basic information taken before they could start asking about what specifically brought them in today. Lines would soon be longer than ever, and this change which was intended for ‘efficiency’ would slow down the entire process.

Efficiency is not reducing downtime for all of the people and pieces of the process; rather, it’s making sure that the most critical resources, in this case the doctor, are used as efficiently as possible. The key point for managers is to recognize when action is truly useful and when it is not.  Before instituting changes, a good manager will ask: Will this change address a real bottleneck in the process? Is this change a response to a systemic issue or a temporary fluctuation? And, above all: Will the benefits of this change outweigh the disruption it will cause?

Sometimes, maybe most of the time, the hardest thing for a manager to do—choosing to do nothing—may be the most effective action of all. It requires confidence, awareness, and a deep understanding of the complex systems at play. By being thoughtful about the timing and impact of changes, managers can lead their teams to success without falling into the trap of change for change’s sake. It’s about striking the right balance between stability and adaptability, knowing that the former can sometimes be the best path to long-term efficiency and growth.