The principle of “division of labour” has long been established in the field of economics. Essentially it recognizes that in order to achieve best possible desired outcomes, an organization must appoint the right people and the right number of people to do the right things at the right time.
Too many times (still) business owners attempt to cover a number of bases (work functions) which well and truly exceed their capacity (and often their capability also). I consider that this is mainly attempted as a cost-limiting exercise (e.g. lean principles). Unfortunately, this cost-restriction mentality can be a double-edged sword. Recently I was working within a production business that prided itself on working in accordance with lean principles. The problem that they had however was the business steadily became more and more lean…until there was not much meat left on the bones at all. As capacity was allowed to reduce, disproportionate adjustments to the managed speed of production were made; which resulted in the product flow rate exceeding the ability of employees to manage and so frequent stopping and starting of the production line was required in order to clear product build-up.
I estimate that any cost economies achieved through allowing production team member numbers to fall were negated by having to stop and start production frequently in order to manage backlogging of built-up product. Lean principles are fine to work to, providing that you remember to match capacity to output requirements/ targets…which in essence means making sure that you don’t strip the bones of your business bare !