How to Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

Can you remember a time when things at work were unjustifiably and annoyingly hard? Maybe you had to read a 1000-word email that could have been just one paragraph or had to attend a two-hour meeting that could have been an email. Or maybe you had to manually input data, although the process should have been automated ages ago.

Millions of hours get lost every day to red tape and workarounds that shouldn’t have to exist in the first place, while misguided leaders keep piling on complexity that only makes things worse. The result is a workplace clogged with friction—the time-consuming and soul-crushing practices that drive us crazy and undermine our ability to achieve meaningful goals.

My recent guest on the CultureLab podcast, Professor Bob Sutton, has been so fascinated by friction at work that he devoted seven years to researching it. His work resulted in a book co-authored with Huggy Rao, The Friction Project.

Here are some of the things I learned from Bob Sutton:

Not all friction is bad

We are all familiar with bad friction caused by the things that slow us down and make our jobs more difficult and frustrating. When people get asked about examples of bad friction, they mention things like “death by meeting,” “the tower of no,” “blowhard bosses,” or “leadership by gobbledegook.”

However, not all friction is bad. As Bob Sutton shared in our conversation - some things should be hard — like cheating, stealing, or making stupid decisions quickly. This is where good friction comes in.

For an example of good friction that was introduced in Google by Laszlo Bock, listen to this short snippet from my interview with Bob Sutton:

Friction fixers

According to Bob Sutton, effective leaders should become 'friction fixers,' actively working to remove unnecessary friction and streamline operations. This includes simplifying processes, improving communication, and fostering a culture of openness and efficiency.

Here are three things you can do to become an effective friction fixer yourself:

1. Become a trustee of others’ time

In 1940, amid WWII, Winston Churchill, set out to address an enemy he feared more than anything else. In his 234-word “Brevity” memo, he asked his colleagues to “see to it that their reports are shorter,” write “short, crisp paragraphs,” move statistics to appendices, and to stop using “officialese jargon” and “woolly phrases.” He also reminded diplomats that “the number and length of messages sent are no measure of efficiency.”

Winston Churchill possessed one of the vital skills of a friction fixer - he saw himself as a trustee of others’ time. According to Bob Sutton, trustees focus on spotting and removing obstacles that squander people’s time.

Some companies that Bob featured in his book have taken a methodical approach.

For example, in late 2015, a group of senior executives came to Pushkala Subramanian with an unusual job offer: Would she head up a new effort to simplify how the 60,000-employee pharmaceutical giant worked? Subramanian, then the head of operations for clinical services at AstraZeneca’s MedImmune division in Gaithersburg, Maryland, was wary, but eventually, she agreed.

One of her team’s first proposals was to create a “million-hour challenge,” asking business units worldwide to find ways to save their people’s time so they can focus on what’s truly important. Just imagine what would be possible for an organization that has an extra million hours to work on it its priorities!

Watch how AstraZeneca executives introduced the Million Hour Challenge to the company:

2. Cultivate ownership and accountability for friction fixing

Great friction fixers know that making the right things easier and the wrong things harder is rarely a part of people’s job description. As a result, really important problems that can undermine a team’s effectiveness often don’t get addressed. Leaders who are great friction fixers tend to do three things to cultivate ownership and accountability:

• They communicate, and model expectations that friction fixing is important work.
• They reward friction-fixing work and mindset and actively discourage adding complexity or bad friction.
• They appoint directly responsible individuals,” or DRIs, Apple lingo for the person (or team) “responsible for getting the tasks done, making crucial decisions, and keeping the project on track.”

3. Know that organizational design is the highest form of friction-fixing

The best friction fixers are not naive. They know that, in most cases, they can’t design an entire organization from scratch. However, as Bob Sutton puts it: “They find ways to build better systems—not make the best of crappy ones. Tweaking and transforming teams and organizations so that they don’t drive people crazy, don’t stifle productivity, and do bolster better decisions, coordination, and innovation is the kind of leadership work that matters most when it comes to friction fixing.”

Bob Sutton is an organizational psychologist and Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.? He studies leadership, innovation, organizational change, and workplace dynamics.? His main focus over the past decade is on scaling and leading at scale—how to grow organizations, spread good things (and remove bad things) in teams and organizations.

To listen to my interview with him, sign up to the CultureLab Newsletter HERE.

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