Creating a Frictionless Company: 3 Key Drivers for Success

In my line of work, I've found that 95% of most business founders are eager to get to higher levels of achievement when they are clear about their purpose. But when you are involved with a team of 10 or more people, some complexities will arise that cause friction within teams.

Friction can be defined as anything that creates inertia, delays or wastage of effort. It can be both intentional or unintentional. Friction exists because of a fixed perspective toward a situation or condition.

For instance, you might have a disagreement with a co-founder or team member about, say, the way to run a business. Because of this disagreement, your attention is taken away from other things that matter, that might have a higher priority rather than discussing this present thing. As a result, your energy is drained. The sense of trust you have toward this person you have a disagreement with declines. This domino effect creates an even more drag on your brain and the cognitive effectiveness of those involved in this.

This is the reason why disagreeable and toxic cultures end up getting the better of us. When there is a high level of cognitive load, you end up taking more time to get things done.

So it seems like there's no other way but for such an organization to fail. You now have to either eliminate the person who is being a toxic influence, or find some way to resolve it. On one hand, taking the time to resolve it can be viewed as a waste of time in the eyes of the business owner. Why not just axe them and be done with it! It's much faster, right? Well, yes... and your reputation get's axed along with it, especially in the age of social media where one's reputation can be destroyed rather quickly if one is not grounded and balanced.

I know this about companies and their success.

1. Problems exist due to a fixed perspective. I've noticed that great leaders realize that how you see the problem is more important to the outcome of the business than the problem itself. For instance, an employee may have botched a job. It could be easy to simply blame an employee for something gone wrong, rather than adjust the process that the employee was having trouble with. Or, that one might be the best in bringing in majority of sales through one's individual network. It could make one assume that they are the best and therefore others are inferior to them. All these are examples of a fixed perspective. They are caused by incorrectly assuming the real "cause" of success and failure. In either case, the way you see the problem is the way you create the outcome. In the former example, blaming engenders a more toxic work environment, while having a perspective that supporting with adjustments to processes will assist people in making work more tolerable, even pleasant can completely change a company culture!
2. Struggles are important to success, and need to be appreciated more. It is not possible to not encounter friction. But, I do know that sometimes, you need to fight in order to get to know someone better. There is a distinction between task conflict (work and process related) and interpersonal conflict (taking it more personally). And it is necessary to move away from taking things personally (I cover this in my work on self-leadership and emotional intelligence). It also means to not run away, avoid or dismiss confrontations that can potentially make your struggle worthwhile. If I have a decent sized splinter under my skin, the struggle is in facing the pain of digging into my skin to pull it out. But we know that doing that is going to bring longer term relief. We are all practicing and getting better at what we do more of!
3. Trigger-reactions show you a way to alternative communication approaches. Every style of communication, if applied incorrectly at an inappropriate time, can be abrasive. I once had a training program that required sharing of insights. One of them, a young lawyer, raised her hand and said "what do you expect me to learn from her". She was insinuating, through tone of voice, and her rolling of her eyes, that she was unwilling to do this exercise. Turns out the person she pointed to was a paralegal whom she deemed "inferior" to her. In the spur of the moment, I treated the question like an inquiry. You know, an honest question. So I laid out the benefits of learning from different perspectives, and offered logical suggestions. After hearing it, she was just less averse to the exercise enough to participate in it.

I believe there are three key areas of information that leaders need in order to create a frictionless company.

The first is to ensure Job Fit. In other words, when you can get people to feel right in their job, you are likely to reduce friction about what they produce and how they produce it. Job fit also entails being excited by where the company is going and how the company is getting there. Employees can hardly just do their tasks as a measure of job fit. They need to see that the job is meaningful to the larger goals that the organization, and even embrace and support it.

Problem: Most founders of organizations do not have a systematic way to hire the right people into a company.

The second is to ensure Team Fit. Sometimes, these include elements of team understanding and communication. Other times, it means finding people with the right attributes and traits who can have effective, non-violent communication with other team members so that productivity can increase and that the team learns and grows along the way.

Problem: There's a general lack of awareness by newer entrepreneurs about how to make teams connect well unless you've been exposed to many teams before. It requires a way for the leader to draw out and exploit strengths and balance out weaknesses.

The third is to ensure Culture Fit. Culture is often a nebulous thing. How do you "create" culture? Well, there are many approaches to this and probably a topic for a different article. But culture fit means you've set the standards of certain kinds of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors in your organization, and backing it up with both material and psychological rewards. Much of culture fit comes in the common language that you build within the organization, which is why leaders must learn to have a consistent lexicon - a library of words or phrases - that help remind people about the kind of person that is valued in the organization.

Problem: Entrepreneurs often let culture develop unconsciously and unintentionally rather than deliberately. This requires the practice of Envisioning which I will write about in a later newsletter.

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 in government and Fortune 500 companies 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.