The Last Episode of The Work Life Balance Podcast

Ask any successful business owner and they will tell you one of the number one rules to optimizing the success of a business starts with producing effective results with the greatest efficiency. This may not seem like a concern if you don’t own your own business, but even as an employee, or business professional, your success is riding on your ability to perform with the greatest effectiveness and efficiency. Whether you are an employee or business owner, it is your goal to be as effective as you can with the greatest efficiency. If you are an employee, the more effective and efficient you are, the greater asset you present to your employer. As a business owner, the more you can optimize these two factors, the greater return on investment you will realize in your business. So, how do you improve your career or business by improving effectiveness and efficiency? Let's begin by reviewing the difference between the two terms: Effective - Producing a decided, decisive or desired effect. Effective emphasizes the actual production of or the power to produce an effect or result. Efficient - Acting or a potential for action or use in such a way as to avoid loss or waste of energy in effecting, producing or functioning. Effectiveness is the building block, while efficiency is the process of refinement. The better you become at effecting positive results with the greatest efficiency of effort, the bigger asset you become - and so does your business. Optimizing effectiveness and efficiency doesn’t have any relation to IQ or intelligence levels, it‘s really an awareness of your habits. It’s a delicate balance between effecting positive results with the least amount of energy expenditure. This essentially means that you expend the least amount of energy with the largest return - while effectively creating the desired result. Take Henry Ford for example, here is a man that was not well educated, but knew that in order to build a successful business he needed to be effective and efficient. Granted, Ford had other skills that contributed to his success, but he was obsessed with optimizing the effectiveness and efficiency of his assembly line in the interest of the success of his company. This obsession led to constant production procedure refinements that were unheard of at the time. Ford understood that quality effectiveness and high efficiency were vital to building the best car with the least amount of wasted energy. Over a century later, Ford built one of the largest and most successful car manufacturers in the world. While many of his peers at the time thought his ideas were impossible, his innovations still remain a standard in modern day car manufacturing today. Optimizing your effectiveness and efficiency is vital to your success even if you are not a Bill Gates, Donald Trump, or Henry Ford. Your personal life depends on it and so does your professional life. Let’s start by discussing improving effectiveness. What does this actually mean? In the most basic terms, you must first learn how to create positive effects, change or results; though by definition you could be effective at producing negative effects. However, our focus is on becoming proficient at producing positive effects. The better you become at effectively creating desired results, the better your personal and professional life becomes. So how do you know if you are being effective? The first step is to ask yourself what kind of actions you are taking. If the goal is to produce a desired result, every step between the initial action and completed action needs to be in support of the desired result. Recall a situation or project that produced a less than optimal result. If you go back through the series of actions that led to the result, can you pinpoint what might have triggered the shift from the direction of positive results to non-effective results? When the “trigger” can be identified, you can learn from that experience and be more effective in future situations by changing or avoiding the action that created the negative result. Being effective is nothing more than a series of evaluations of past results to identify and separate the successful actions from the negative actions. This evaluation process not only applies to your professional life, it applies to your personal life as well. Your career or your business is only as good as you are - which is why self-improvement is a vital part of your professional success. If you cannot learn to effect positive results, the success of your business will be limited. For optimal success, a dedication to improving effectiveness in your personal life is important. Don’t ever think your career or business doesn’t have anything to do with you personally. Remember, the effects that are created in your professional life are a direct reflection of you. Every situation, whether professional or personal, deserves adequate evaluation for your improved success. Now let’s discuss efficiency. Effectiveness is the ...