Many leaders don’t understand what makes a team operate efficiently.

Usually, they want to measure it in time. They must then invent a “unit of work” for a knowledge worker to apply a 20th century assembly line mentality. “How much work did they do this week?” This entire mindset is doomed and backwards.

You evaluate team efficiency by how much you can remove.

• Meetings deleted.
• Documents simplified.
• Steps removed.
• Sign-offs streamlined.
• Busywork eliminated.
• Sidequests culled.
• Changes consolidated.
• Emails shortened.
• Blockers vanished.
• Priorities aligned.
• Hours reduced.

Those are the signs that your team is empowered, making good decisions, and focused on the most important work. If your team or department lead can walk away for 3 months and everything keeps running smoothly? You’re near efficiency nirvana.

You probably also have a happy & healthy team.

But if you see a happy & healthy team and think that means you’re leaving money & capacity on the table, you were never looking for efficiency. You wanted *extraction.* That’s a very profitable tactic for “dine & dash” executives who want things to stay on the rails just long enough to cash out.

Efficiency is a social challenge because your company is made of humans. If you try to make it a numbers challenge, you’re solving a different problem you created in the boardroom.