Friction is everywhere — good leaders learn how to remove it

For your own business, figure out where you’re getting in your own way of selling products because of friction. These are places where there’s anxiety or stress on a team, and I’d highly encourage investing some time looking for these areas throughout your organization.”

Doug Phares, managing director, Silverwind Enterprises

Friction is just about everywhere you look. But if you’re in charge, it’s your job to minimize it as much as possible. Every transaction, customer engagement, product delivery, etc., will have some level of friction. That’s true for anyone who doesn’t operate 100% by themselves. While you can never completely remove friction, reducing it pays dividends.

There are two types of friction in business: internal and external. External friction is when a company like Google has an issue that’s inconveniencing a million of their hundreds of millions of customers. That’s a big enough percentage of their user base to be worth their time to remove as much friction as possible, but an issue that affects 10 people probably wouldn’t be worthwhile for them to resolve.

On the other hand, internal friction happens within your organization. Usually, it results from issues with your core processes at work. I recently saw this while working with an organization that was rapidly expanding. They had one location that worked like a top — excellent communication, everyone knew their role, and there was a general understanding of the bumpy areas and how those issues were to be dealt with.

My client took this to mean they had great, easily transferable processes. Not so. They had a stable, well-informed team that knew how to problem-solve together. Trying to expand this institutional knowledge to the new team, my client quickly found that their processes were not as infallible as they believed.

When presented with the same problem, the first team would go left, while the second team decided right seemed to be the way to go. When they had the first team help document the procedures they’d established, the second team found that several of these solutions and ways of doing things were organic workarounds rather than logical answers. This illuminated areas of friction and the ability to correct processes and procedures that would no longer require workarounds. Who knows if they’d have found those improvements if they hadn’t tried to scale?

Perhaps ironically, friction is often the result of experienced professionals trying to make things run more smoothly. For example, a salesperson tries to enter an order but finds they can’t fill out all 19 boxes on the sales screen. As a result, they can’t complete the order. This problem comes from someone in accounting who, wanting to be as efficient as possible, realized that order forms would go more easily for them when the answers were placed in their corresponding boxes.

That sounds great in theory, but this salesperson doesn’t know what to put in box 16a, creating a lot of friction in completing their orders. To remove that friction, the salesperson would need a way to opt out of filling in that box or better options so they don’t have to force the customer into something that doesn’t fit. But accounting might not like that. Your role is to work that out for everyone. That might be you doing it, or you might be appointing someone capable of seeing all aspects and being empowered to resolve them.

For your own business, figure out where you’re getting in your own way of selling products because of friction. These are places where there’s anxiety or stress on a team, and I’d highly encourage investing some time looking for these areas throughout your organization. The trendy term for these is pain points, and finding these areas of heavy lifting is crucial to reducing friction.

Sometimes, discovering points of friction takes some sleuthing. Other times, it’s easy. You can just walk into a department and ask them to name the dumbest thing they do all day. Sometimes you’ll get good answers, and sometimes you’ll get bad answers. Either way, keep asking. By operating in good faith and listening, you’ll learn a lot about the role of friction in your organization.

When I started managing a new regional branch, I found that the most productive use of my time for the first week was to interview managers and sub-managers to find these pain points. There were some issues I couldn't fix, of course, but there were many more that I could. This was a great way to make a good first impression with the new team and reduce friction with minimal costs, which benefited the organization, the team and our customers.

Ultimately, the higher my rank, the more my goal became simplified to two essential points. The first part of that goal was setting a direction for the organization. The second part was getting out of the way. Clear yourself and as many hurdles as possible from your team’s path, and you’re removing friction. This way, your people will be able to accomplish the big picture things you want them to do instead of being caught up shouting expletives at a screen because they can’t fill out box 16a.

Doug Phares is the former CEO of the Sandusky News Group. He currently serves as managing director of Silverwind Enterprises, which owns and provides management services to small businesses. He can be reached at doug@silverwind.biz.