Do social responsibility, vision-based management, and providing team with safety increases project efficiency?

Question

Recently I've been getting into management philosophy by reading some basic Drucker and Collins, very interesting stuff. Coming from an engineering background my idea about any subject would be for it to be effective and efficient(maximize efficiency). However, management often talks about social responsibility, vision-based management, and providing under-performing employees with safety.

Do these topics maximize efficiency, or are they simply there as a best practice rule of thumb? If they do not provide efficiency are they more virtuous practices that are simply implemented depending on the whims of the employer?

Answer 1

Taking Care of People is Efficient

The empirical project management approach is to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of an approach by measuring its outcomes. Pragmatically, the goal is therefore to optimize the effectiveness and efficiency of project delivery rather than "efficiency" in some philosophical or abstract sense.

People (and by extension, both team and company cultures) are core components of any successful project. People are not machines. You can't "maximize efficiency" of individuals or teams the way an engineer might optimize cogs in a machine. This has always been true, but modern project management (especially agile frameworks like Scrum) make this more explicit.

As a project manager, your focus should therefore be on the efficient use of resources rather than on grinding out ersatz efficiencies that are unlikely to complete your projects on time, on budget, or to defined quality targets. Modern project management therefore puts communication, culture, and buy-in from both management and the workforce front and center of any successful project.

See Also

• Theory X and Theory Y
• The 100% Utilization Fallacy
• Scrum Theory
• Scrum Values
• The Agile Manifesto