“That’s lovely, but in the end, it’s all about economics and the bottom line,” said the CEO of the $10M company.

We’d been discussing the creative and sometimes dueling tensions of being a leader. My point had been that—over time—a leader has to assure equilibrium between task completion and relationship building. Over-emphasizing one to the detriment of the other creates negative outcomes. Too much focus on either task or relationship decreases productivity, hurts morale, and drives turnover.

“So in terms of what we were discussing about task and relationship, what exactly does that mean?”

“It means I’ll tell my team to forego the soft relationship stuff if I think it’s taking up too much time and getting in the way of meeting our financial objectives.”

“How much time is too much time?”

“I’ll decide that.”

“So no personal talk before staff meetings? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, and all the other chit-chat about kids and stuff.”

“No sports talk either?”

“That takes up time, too.”

“Just want to understand here. So you would tell your staff to talk only about business matters, nothing else, say, for the length of a really big project that has a tight turn-around time?”

“I’d tell them to stop it for as long as it takes. Could be indefinite. I’ll decide what I think is best based on financials.”

“Isn’t that a little extreme?”

“What do you mean?”

“If employees could only talk about work matters—and absolutely nothing else—I think they would get unhappy pretty fast no matter how fascinating the work.”

“Then they would just have to work someplace else.”

An intriguing mindset.

Short-sighted, too.

And counter-productive from my perspective to what he wants to achieve.

In the end, it’s all about people.

All work gets done by and through people.

Engaged people are productive people.

Productivity drives bottom line economics.

Enough said.

But what say you?

Image source before quote:  morgueFile.com