“Whenever there is a hard job
to be done, I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find
an easy way of doing it.”
- Walter Chrysler
At first glance, lazy employees seem to be the opposite of
an ideal hire. While constantly complaining about how
much they have to do, they never seem to be doing anything.
But, a lazy employee might not be all that he or she appears
to be. Lazy people have an important strength ‒ finding
shortcuts. Since they want to do as little as possible, they
always find easy ways of getting the job done.
Walter Chrysler needed this kind of lazy genius on his
side each time he was called in to save dying car
companies. Early in his career, Walter toiled for Buick Motors
while the company made 45 cars a day. In less than a decade,
he helped to increase production numbers to 600 a day! It
was rumoured that the founder of General Motors made
Chrysler the salary offer of US$10,000 (US$165,000 in
today’s dollars) a month in an attempt to keep him at the helm
of Buick. What Chrysler did was to streamline the
manufacturing process, putting people and parts in the right
places.
Do you manage people who never seem busy enough but appear
to keep your organisation humming? Chances are they do
something so well that they seem lazy. Take a lesson from
their attraction to shortcuts. Organisations with
efficient employees can regularly increase their productivity
– the route to a fatter bottom line. If you have got “lazy”
employees, find out what they do best and ask them to do more
of it. At the end of the day, it is hard work that requires
easy shortcuts.