It’s 1922. Your boss walks into the steel factory, eyes gleaming with excitement. He just read Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management and wants you to apply his ideas. Stat!
The book has been a best-seller for a while, so you know what to do. You break down the workers’ jobs into tasks and track how long each takes, optimizing every step. You assign managers to oversee operations, ensuring every worker follows precise instructions and rests exactly when they are told to.
A few weeks later, production is up. No second is wasted. Management as a science works: it delivers repeatable, measurable results 📈
When efficiency becomes a problem
Now fast-forward to 2025.
Your teams aren’t standing on an assembly line, working on the same tasks every day. Some work remotely, spread across time zones; they’re designing software, creating campaigns, and delivering services uniquely tailored to individual clients. They need creativity and flexibility to succeed.
And yet, many organizations still cling to Taylor’s principles of rigid efficiency today, often without realizing the cost. They meticulously track time in 15-minute increments, push for maximum utilization, and treat every team member as an interchangeable resource. But in doing so, they risk overlooking the very things that make modern teams thrive.
You’ve got the science. But where is the (he)art?
Now to be clear, we’re not saying that scientific, data-driven management is bad. Look at its enormous benefits:
• Predictable project timelines
• Efficient resource allocation
• Clear performance metrics
• Data-driven decision making
What we are saying is that businesses today require more than just numbers. The scientific approach gives you essential structure, sure; but a well-balanced team also needs an element of art—the creativity, empathy, and strategic intuition that go beyond numbers.
Here are three ways successful leaders put people at the center of resource management:
1. Understand team strengths & dynamics
Unlike assembly line workers performing repetitive tasks, today’s teams handle complex projects with diverse skill sets. Effective resource management isn’t about assigning tasks to the first available person: it’s about assigning the best-fit person to the task based on capacity, skills, interests, and team chemistry.
This requires leaders to play to their team’s strengths. As Jason Fisher, Global Studio Director at Flight Studio, puts it:
“I have people in my team who really excel in static visual design, while others are stronger in video. One can cross over, but they’ll be quicker at one and slower at the other. That understanding is key to planning effectively.”
Emily Feliciano, Senior Global Creative Resource Manager at Atlassian, also highlights the importance of “consider[ing] team cohesion. You can’t always ensure everyone will like each other, but it does impact project health, speed, and delivery.”
2. Acknowledge that capacity is fluid
Your team’s work time is not fixed. It ebbs and flows over weeks and months.
“It’s not a 40-hour workweek anymore. You have vacations, you have family leave, and you have different aspects of your day that are taken up in non-billable work,” says Glenn Rogers, our CEO at Float. “[And] we’ve seen the best companies and world-class brands succeed not by having the highest utilization rate, but by the clever allocation of people across projects.”
While planning, factor in administrative tasks, time off, and unplanned work—that way, you can respect your team’s limits and create realistic workloads.
3. Treat your team as people, not just resources
The term ‘resource management’ can sometimes distance leaders from the reality they’re managing people, not assets. Matt Smith, Producer at STORM+SHELTER, warns against this mindset:
“Each person on your team is more than just a resource. Treating people solely as assets to be arranged and used has a very real human cost. Take, for example, someone working a grueling 12-hour day on set. It’s unrealistic to expect them to be firing on all cylinders the very next morning.”
The best teams prioritize balance
Scientific management revolutionized work in the 20th century. In the 21st, the best managers don’t just optimize for efficiency: they balance it with humanity. And that’s how you build unstoppable teams—where science meets (he)art, and metrics meet meaning.
