These days, we’ve all heard people emphasize a new belief that’s been going round – that hard work has been replaced by smart work. This idea has started working its way into every sector, including management training. After all, “smart” businesses seem to have a tendency to thrive, while the “hard working” one’s often have difficulty. It’s important to remember that this definitely isn’t a new gimmick or strategic tactic to win over new customers and clients; it has actually become a fundamental necessity for business survival in these times. The idea of working smarter has – in all likelihood, emerged to bridge the widening gap between our ever-increasing desires and the ever-decreasing availability of our own personal time.
These two opposing forces require an optimum usage of our individual resources – be it our time or money. Hard work calls for “doing things rightly”, whereas smart work is all about “doing right things”. The underlying philosophy for these two approaches might appear – on the surface, to be simply a rearrangement of letters and words, but the actual consequences resulting from following one or the other may be radically different. This is a clear and unmistakable shift from being “efficiently” to “effectively”.
At this point, the separation between these two methodologies becomes somewhat unclear, because while our hard working pursuits might excel at procuring resources or increasing the number of products being manufactured for the optimisation of business operations, smart working encompasses the management of energy, obligations, people and the physical environment so as to utilise them as efficiently as possible, thereby continually maximising the output for any available input.
As is evident from the easily seen benefits of “smart working”, business coaching experts agree that an individual is more likely to succeed by following this approach than by adhering to the “hard working” ideal. However, the irony of this is that a lot of hard work goes behind being smart. In other words, if you work smartly, it doesn’t mean that you can sit back and relax, expecting wonders to occur to your organization on their own – it requires very hard work. Whether working “Hard” or “Smart”, every workload in each instance can be managed by a proper delegation of tasks, and small initiatives can go a long way toward saving time in each methodology. So, we have to conclude that it’s a blend of these two approaches that most ideally serves our intended purpose – successful enterprising!
Alan Gillies is the Managing Director of the L2L Group, specialising in providing Executive Coaching, Training and Consultancy Services to Businesses across the Globe. Want to learn more about these business success strategies? Get Alan’s popular FREE Business Pack today!
