As a leader, if you've looked around you and wondered why some leaders seem to have all the time in the world, while you're feeling stressed and under the hammer, perhaps you need to lead the lazy way instead.

The Oxford University Press defines Lazy as:

1. Unwilling to work or use energy.
2. Showing or characterized by a lack of effort or care.

Both of these are very good definitions of what the lazy leader should be; unwilling to expend useless energy and characterised by a lack of effort. Unfortunately, the definition is somewhat limited in vision for true leadership.

As a lazy leader myself, I often have a basic desire to sit back and relax. Now I could just stop…

…and at some level I have achieved it; but apart from some nice white space, what have I really accomplished? Well, I stopped typing, leant back for a second and breathed deep. I avoided a little bit of work and conserved a tiny amount of my energy for that nap a little later. This does sound at least a little like laziness, and certainly not the characteristic of a leader.

At another level though, my conscious mind is doing a whole different set of things; I may have stopped writing for example, but my brain is asking a series of awkward questions. Can I get away with leaving white space? Will the browser format it out? Will you keep reading and will you, the reader "get it?" So despite being lazy on one level, at another level I've just bought a whole mess of pain and worry -- if I tried to extend this to far, the analogy really breaks down. No matter how lazy a leader I choose to be, I doubt I could get away with an article that consisted of nothing but white space!

At my bloghttp://lazyleaders.blogspot.com, this is the kind of subject I regularly ponder. I hope you see from the above example, that, in and of itself, laziness really won't get you anywhere, however the desire to be lazy can.

Consider a successful Partner I know in a major professional services firm. He is young, up and coming and making lots of money. Many people respect him for both his work ethic and his administrative abilities; he is unusual in that not only does he bring the work in, he also does the administrative work necessary to ensure it is billed and collected too. To most of us, this looks like hard work, but from him I learnt one of the key lessons of successful lazy leadership. Simply put, this is that “Being lazy is sometimes hard work”

In fact, his exact words went something like this:
“If you hate administration, then you have two options do it right first time so it never comes back to bother you again or ignore it and do a poor job and have it come back to you time and time again.”

If you can understand this and how it relates to the definition, you are on your way to a new level of laziness, and I hope better leadership as a result.

Terry Rook is a Senior Manager in a large professional services organisation. At http://lazyleaders.blogspot.com he is taking his own original observations on leadership and how to improve your life, and that of your team, through being lazy.

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