Leadership Lesson – Running Better Teams with Less Resources

corporate team together make stronger teamAs leaders and those who are in positions to ask for more resources, we tend to take the easy route and just ask for them. Sometimes we make the unavailability of resources to be a hinderance to our jobs. Sometimes we make that an excuse for poor execution or even poor quality of service.
As individuals we say to our bosses, “I’m not getting paid enough to do all this.” As managers we say, “We need to hire more people, we need better infrastructure, we need this, and we need that.” Naturally, as consumers so driven in an ever competitive world, having more means better status — how many time have we counted the size of the team we are managing but not the revenue that we are generating?

Jake Shimabukuro a genius musician, the Jimi Hendrix of ukelele said that ukelele players tend to think that they don’t have enough strings, because the guitar has six strings and the ukelele has only four. As a result, the guitar can produce a wider range of sounds. One day Jake was re-stringing his ukelele and couldn’t find the third string, and figured maybe he can play the instrument with just three strings and composed this beautiful song called, “Missing Three”.

 

It just makes you wonder, as a leader when have we stopped to look at the resources we have and pushed the boundaries to achieve greater heights? In a highly competitive world with diminishing resources, we need to figure out how we’re going to run our departments better with just enough resources.