4 Principles of a Frictionless Company

I decided to follow up on the concept that I was sharing yesterday, called the "frictionless company", and perhaps try to flesh it out a bit more.

#founders are constantly searching for better ways to make a better revenue. They scan the marketplace, look for the latest growth hacks, and try to raise more "business". It's so instinctive that you can't help but realize its fallacy. It is raising the business from the outside, in.

The numbers will probably look good... But do people feel a sense of purpose getting work done?

I recently came across an ex-owner of a company who had sold the business for a sizable 7-figure amount. This person was dismissive, arrogant, negative, standoffish, and quite the tyrant. And these aren't the words I use to describe the ex-owner. It's the words used by ex-colleagues. And boy were they happy to see her go. Revenues in the small team of about a dozen met with incessant demands for numbers, numbers, numbers. It became a culture where if you did not have your numbers you ought to be shitting your pants. The ex-owner would sit in meetings, expect everyone to give a report on these, but tear into people who failed to meet results, ridicule them and sometimes fire them in front of everyone.

I know you probably think this is an archaic (and rather dumb) way to deal with employees in the age of social media. But it happened. As a friction-full company, there were many things happening.

• The leader was a tyrant, unwilling to listen, and only favored those who produced tangible results.
• Employees were driven by tasks, not strong company values.
• It was impossible to feel trusted or have #psychologicalsafety in this space.
• Employees became tools rather than valued partners.
• Employees were expected to swim... or sink. It is a sum of a demeaning ultimatum that if you are not competent, you must be useless.

So, what are the principles of a frictionless company? Just take the above case study, and start to flip it.

Principle 1: Establish strong leadership.

What is a strong leader? Someone who can strike a the balance between harmony and productivity at the same time. The trouble with most of us is that we model the leadership that we know. And if we don't see great leaders, we have mediocre leaders. One of the leaders I learnt the most from was someone I knew in the Army. He walked with his men, dined with his men. He was as much a follower of good and sensible ideas from his staff as he was a leader who would expect high standards from others. I only saw him lose his temper once - and it was clearly directed to an unbearably lazy person.

So how does the balance between harmony and productivity happen? It begins with listening and observing. Most leaders themselves have tasks to complete themselves. I mean as a co-founder of Super Scaling, I do have personal goals to achieve myself for the company, but I still have to do the leading of the team in some capacity. So it is not possible for me to listen well to my team if I am constantly harrassed why the work I have to do.

What in the world do you listen for or observe?

• Are there mismatches between the desired outcome of an action and the way the employee is executing on the task, so that you can give immediate feedback that is supportive in nature?
• Are there inherent assumptions that are being made that are incorrect in both the leader and the employee?
• Are there valuable actions that you can catch a person doing that have nothing to do with the intended outcome, but still worthy of praise?

A frictionless leader emphasizes the process as the target of resolution whereas the friction-full leader emphasizes the person as the target of resolution.

Principle 2: Reviewing Your Values.

I chanced upon a video that Simon Sinek had on Youtube about company values. He claims that values have to be "verbs" - that "Innovation" is not a value, and that a phase like "Keep improving processes in clever ways" would be more actionable in nature. And I have a little beef to pick with him on this. Values are not behaviors. They are cognitive constructs that predict motivations and beliefs. Just because you say "define a better idea" doesn't make it any more actionable than "Innovation".

And it's not because you shouldn't put it up on the wall. It's that you ought to have discussions to clarify and exemplify values that the company culture does stand for. If it is conflict with your personal values, you probably wouldn't want to join the company, a hiring concept that I will flesh out in another article.

Let's go back to the foundations of values assessment research. In the world of psychological literature, there are two - an earlier, less validated one called the Rokeach Value Survey and the now more dominant and gold standard for values research, the Schwartz Value Survey. This is a well-defined set of psychometric properties that I won't go through in this article due to its extensive nature. The SVS has a total of 10 universal values:

The approach one can take is to utilize a values-based assessment process to assess leadership as well as candidate values. There is always going to be conflict between individual and company values. The way to identify alignment is if the desired values within the organization belong to the same quadrant or adjacent value sets. Conflict is represented by opposing values.

It therefore follows that if you, as a leader are achievement oriented, but your team members are universalism oriented, you are both likely to have conflicts in your motivations and will likely show up in your behavior.

With proper hiring and proper leadership using values as an emphasis, you are likely to improve harmony, predict what kinds of conversations you need to have in order to create alignment, and therefore reduce effortful communication and improve team dynamics for higher productivity and revenue.

If you are interested in how you can utilize this (1) in your hiring and improve attribute-based hiring in your company, and (2) to espouse a company culture that fits with your purpose and mission, reach out to me for a discussion.

Principle 3: Encourage Conversation.

I get that people are busy. But without having conversation, you can't learn about people. This is why quietness in companies is always frowned upon, and extraversion or expressiveness is often more welcome. It affords some kind of information transfer so that learning and feedback can take place.

However, you really want a combination of 6 types of conversations. This is a leadership skillset you need to develop which includes (1) the ability to have Connection based conversations, (2) Setting Goals and Expectations, (3) Giving and receiving feedback, (4) Development based conversations such as coaching, (5) Influence based conversations such as influence and change, and (6) Healing conversations related to relationship repair, customer recovery and psycholgical safety. I call these the Six Leadership Conversations, and again, I will have to defer my exposition of this model to a later article.

Principle 4: Create Well Oiled, Atomized Processes.

I alluded to this idea of atomization here. The reason why I can say "go get me more sales" to an experienced person, is that they are clear about the procedural behaviors required to arrive there. But to tell someone new or inexperienced to do that would be speaking an alien language to them. What's worse is that impatient leaders will say "go figure it out, that's what I paid you for".

Atomization is nothing more than getting clear about each component. I mean, you can change car tyres as an individual. But a Ferrari pitstop has over 20 people to change tyres. Why? So that with a smooth singular action and lots of practice, the team can switch out the tyres within 2 seconds instead of 5 minutes which creates a massive advantage even if you have a 0.5s headstart.

Enter the process map.

At Super Scaling, we know for a fact that process improvement is an ongoing thing. SOPs that are not dusted off regularly will be forgotten. Hence, whenever you do something and then there are leaks, you have to tighten them and assess how the process can be enhanced to attain better results. Most people I know do well with a visual reference like this one above. It gives clarity, reference for teams to talk about, and benchmarks to determine whether a hand over was efficient or not.

The problem is that many entrepreneurs are not interested in doing these up thoroughly, if at all. It's tedious. Unless they are going to get acquired. Process diagrams like this will serve the organization better by helping to extract the founder out of the equation, so that an investor or buyer can take it off your hands and continue running it, with you having a good exit. And it's not really difficult if it is regular housekeeping. Simply ensure that your operations managers or executives are trained to do this, and keep a regular cadence of ensuring that these processes are being monitored and exercised. If they are not exercised, it must be that the process is redundant in your company.

There are processes for literally everything. But we need to be logical about who needs to see these processes. As a #founder you need to have access to all of these, but you may not have the patience to do them. It's a service we offer to members to take up our War Room where our operations expert consultants will make short work of these on your behalf. It would also do you some good to ensure that you have a project executive or manager to keep your team in adherence to these processes once you can see that they produce results.

If you are considering a War Room, message me and let's have a discussion about it so that you can decide whether or not it fits your agenda, budget and desired results.

In organizing your business processes and workflows more clearly, you can work better together as a team, communicate better, and leave nothing to chance. With this as the basis, you and your team can establish innovation practices so that your processes in handling customers, attaining record fulfillment experiences, or even establishing a good company culture can evolve positively with time.

About The Author

Stuart Tan, MSc., MBA, is co-founder at?Super Scaling Pte Ltd, and Managing Consultant at Ultimate Alliance Consultancy Pte Ltd. He brings his 29 years of management and training consulting experience to support SMEs to develop strategies to scale sustainabily, through an implementation of more effective ways of thinking so that founders can scale their profits, lead their teams more powerfully, by establishing operational excellence through a world class team and systemized processes.