Friction – A Manager’s Secret Weapon
Good managers are skilled at removing obstacles and smoothing paths to enable their team members to work efficiently. Great managers know that these obstacles are also opportunities to promote change and to develop extraordinary teams.
Such obstacles can be thought of as friction. Friction slows work down, often taking the form of additional process—meetings, paperwork, approvals, etc. In the short term, friction reduces efficiency, making the status quo more arduous. But when applied thoughtfully, friction makes alternatives seem easier and change becomes more appealing.
You are already familiar with the intentional use of friction—managers deliberately insert friction into decision-making all the time. Rather than allowing the person closest to a decision to just make it—the most efficient approach—managers insist on vetting alternatives, meetings, buy-in and even approval before a decision is finalized. They know that efficient decisions aren’t necessarily good ones. What may come as a surprise is how so many other management challenges can benefit from friction.
Friction has three incredibly useful qualities:
It isn’t directive. This is a benefit to managers who hate to insist as much as to team members who don’t appreciate being told what to do.
It can be applied incrementally. If small amounts of friction have the desired result, then there’s no need to apply more.
It can be used situationally. The level and type of friction can be calibrated to the context—the specific people, issues and circumstances—rather than deployed as a one-size-fits-all solution.
Because of these qualities, friction generates less opposition than blunter change tools. Using friction to encourage folks to move from where they are to where they need to make these transitions easier on everyone. When the choice is the easy way or the hard way, friction is the very embodiment of the easy way.
Individual behavior change.
Sometimes simply clarifying an expectation is friction enough to motivate a team member to adjust their behavior. Just knowing that a current behavior is disfavored may motivate a team member to embrace an alternative. Other times, it may be necessary to introduce more and more friction to support the desired change.
For instance—a team member regularly neglects to collaborate with co-workers. You’ve made your expectation clear but the lack of collaboration persists. How can friction help?
Ask questions. Each time you meet, you simply ask—how have you involved your colleagues? Repeatedly asking the question each time is a motivator to have a good answer ready.
Offer to get more involved. Sometimes the mere threat of friction, explicit or implied, can be sufficient. The very idea of your presence is likely to make the alternative more appealing. No offense.
Babysit. Call a three-way meeting in which you can observe the team member soliciting the feedback.
Persistence is essential—a team member will be far less inclined to change behavior if they expect the friction to be a temporary inconvenience.
Team behavior.
Changing group behavior often requires using policies and procedures as friction tools. Policies can be blunt instruments, requiring or forbidding specific behaviors. But they can also be applied more flexibly, encouraging alignment with organizational priorities without eliminating individual team members’ capacity to deal with specific situations.
Staff travel offers a great example. Individual staff members may be in the best position to determine the merit of individual travel decisions. But the aggregate cost of travel throughout the whole organization mean that travel choices need to be managed. Friction tools can help align organizational objectives with appropriate individual choices:
Ask questions (again). A policy can require travel requests to be accompanied by answers to a set of questions: What objectives do you intend to accomplish on this trip? Are there any more cost-effective ways to accomplish these objectives? What are the downsides to these alternatives? The simple process of requiring answers nudges individual staff to be more thoughtful—and more accountable—for their choices.
Parameters. A policy can create distinctions between the types of travel decisions that individuals can make without friction and those that require engaging with managers:
Set a dollar ceiling. There may not be a good financial justification for increasing friction around low-dollar travel. Instead, limit the need for additional justification/approval when costs exceed a prescribed amount.
Budgeted v. unbudgeted. Preplanned travel has already survived the friction of the budget process (whether in terms of specific trips, overall amount, or types of travel), so there may be little value in additional process. Additional friction, such as manager sign-off, may be applied to travel that isn’t already budgeted.
Distinguish types of travel, with client-based travel (for example) requiring minimal friction, and professional development (also for example) receiving somewhat more.
Friction alters the balance between competing goals: too much friction will mean that staff will be traveling less than desirable, too little friction will result in too much travel. Both the way the policy is written and how it is implemented offer on-going opportunities to tune that balance.
Friction and day-to-day management.
Managers want to be available to support their team members’ success, quickly answer any questions and resolve whatever complications might arise. But this support carries significant downsides. Team members can become overly dependent on the manager and less likely to develop into confident independent performers. Managers become bottlenecks—overwhelmed—and struggle to balance their own workloads against the immediate needs of their team members.
Friction enables managers to set flexible parameters for their engagement that don’t sacrifice the ability to provide essential support. In the short term, team members are nudged towards greater self-reliance. In the longer term, learning and practice strengthen these capacities, making the team both more effective and efficient. And managers can better balance their own work and priorities with providing the support that only they can provide (orienting new members, exotic challenges, etc.)
The friction tools for finding this balance may seem familiar by now:
Setting expectations. Communicate clearly about when and how team members are expected to engage. These expectations can be generalized for the whole team or specific to an individual or even a project.
Asking questions. The first time a manager asks a bunch of questions may be awkward, but repetition conditions team members to be prepared before they engage:
How have we handled this in the past?
What’s different this time?
Who else have you talked to?
What do you think you should do?
The better team members are at answering these questions for themselves, the less they need to engage.
Letting them wait. If it’s not an emergency, then by definition it can wait. Schedule a time in the not too distant future to talk it through. The delay gives the team member time to consider for themselves how best to address the situation rather than simply asking for guidance.
When using friction to encourage greater autonomy, it’s essential to simultaneously reduce the friction associated with taking initiative and making mistakes. Friction works by making desired alternatives more appealing, so those alternatives need to present as smooth a path as possible.
Mastering the uses of friction enables managers and leaders to continually tune the behavior of their teams and organizations while maximizing individual choice and the capacity to adjust quickly to evolving circumstances. Friction certainly may limit efficiency in the short term, but it is indispensable for building and sustaining long-term effectiveness.