How To Lead Through Good Friction And Make Work Easier

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David Rice: What do good leaders do? How do they motivate, create efficiencies and connect the dots to paint a clear, big picture for their employees and fellow leaders within an organization? The answer may be to create a bit of the right kind of friction from time to time.

Welcome to the People Managing People podcast. We’re on a mission to build a better world of work and help you create happy, healthy, and productive workplaces. I’m your host, David Rice.

My guest today is Robert Sutton. He’s an organizational psychologist and professor of management science in the Stanford Engineering School. He’s also the author of a new book called “The Friction Project – How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder”.

We’re going to take a look at the ideas of good friction and bad friction in the workplace and discuss some of the core concepts of the book that leaders and managers can apply to help their teams thrive through good friction.

So, Bob, welcome. It’s good to have you on the show.

Bob Sutton: It’s great to be here. Nice to meet you, David.

David Rice: So I want to start with what inspired the book. You mentioned it in the opening of the book, but for our listeners, can you describe some of the extent of some of the things that you were seeing that made you feel like this needed to be written?

Bob Sutton: There was sort of two things; one was rational and the other one was more emotional. And the rational one is that my coworker, co-conspirator, whatever, what you call them, Huggy Rao on this adventure, we wrote a book, oh God, life goes fast, 2014 on scaling. And so it’s all these organizations we worked with to name some of them, Google now Alphabet, Facebook now Meta, they’re changing their names. They got so big.

Salesforce, these companies we know in the Bay area that we knew them when they were little. And when you talk to everybody we know who’s worked there a long time, they talk about how it gets harder and harder to get things done as they get larger and more complex. So that was one of the causes of us writing the book.

The other one was more emotional that in our interactions with people in the classroom and the companies that we work with just in our lives, people would just talk about how hard it was to get simple things done, things like walking in muck. I work in a frustration factory.

And I remember this middle manager saying to us, essentially, I feel like I’m living in a world of shit and they expect me to show some initiative. And so we got interested in the bad news and we can talk about the good news in a little bit but it was the bad news that got us going and it was the optimism that kept us going.

David Rice: So when we hear the word friction in an organizational sense, most people cringe and they think of those bad experiences like we’re talking about, but there is such a good thing as good friction that helps us build things, create better products. So can you tell us a little bit more about, what good friction looks like and how to replicate it when we see it?

Bob Sutton: That’s something we’ve really been thinking about a lot, continuing with this theme that when the project started, which is like friction’s bad, and if something is hard to do, or if it’s a struggle or feels difficult. But then, we started looking at the actual evidence and there are certain things that are hard to do and should be hard to do, and we think about the notion of a related point when speed is your enemy.

And to give you just two or three things that should be hard and slow, that when you don’t know what to do as a leader team, it’s better to hit the brakes and to figure out what the heck is going on rather than rush ahead and to make a decision. Which is we see this over and over and over again, where people make impulsive decisions and then they’re sorry later, especially when they’re irreversible.

That would be one example. And it’s good to slow down. The second thing is just the research on creativity and I’ve been studying and following the literature on creativity for some 25 years and the evidence for creativity is it’s just a messy, inefficient process. And I mean, we may see just in this era where like ChatGPT and these large language models and everything and people are working on variations of this for decades.

Although maybe it’s happening faster than they thought, but that means that it’s happening 10 years faster than they thought. And so creativity is a difficult process and one of my favorite quotes in the book, I can’t believe this, Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian got interviewed by Harvard Business Review, which is the most unlikely thing I can think of as it is.

But, and it’s this really funny interview and they ask him, they said so you and Larry David, you did all the writing yourself and you got so burned out, you had to end the episode. And they said, could McKinsey help you? And then he asked him, who’s McKinsey? And then they tell him, and then he says, are they funny?

They say no. And then he said, I don’t want them. The hard way is the right way. If you’re doing it efficient and you’re doing it wrong, and I think that that applies in all sorts of settings. And, I haven’t heard yet. So one of my favorite books ever, Creativity Incorporated by Ed Catmull, which I would nominate as the best, certainly the best creativity and business book ever written, possibly the best business book ever written.

So Ed, who we got to know pretty well over the last 15 years. If you talk to Ed about efficiency in making films at Pixar, he just gets confused because it’s just irrelevant. His perspective is we just keep iterating until it’s good enough. And we have high standards that, and then just as a final one in this area of move fast and break things.

That there’s quite good evidence in academia, the faster people go, especially the faster the corporate culture and the more in a hurry they’re in, the more likely they are to cheat. And we certainly see that with Elizabeth Holmes, a dropout of my own university, Sam Baikman Freed, I think some of that was going on there with the cryptocurrency.

And so those are just some of the times when you want to slow down and make things difficult. Oh, and gee, by the way, for people interested in long term relationships, whether it’s love or whether it’s, emotional attachment to the team, the longer people work together and the more they struggle, the better it is.

And of course, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, they’ve been working together since 1965. That seems to be working pretty well. And The Supremes, I love this, that Supreme song – You Can’t Hurry Love, that’s empirically correct. So there’s just some times when you got to slow down and struggle a little bit.

And finally, I already said finally, once one of my favorite things, which I just got interested in this research, just as we’re finishing the book, there’s this research on savoring and there’s all these great things in life. Eating a great meal, making love, like figure out what you want. Like when you rush them, they’re not as good.

So this idea of slowing down and sort of savoring the good things in life, you want those to be a little bit inefficient too. So anyway, so those are just some of the things that sort of struck us that there’s all, there are advantages to good friction. And we think of the gas and the brakes a lot of times.

Sometimes you got to hit the brakes and sometimes you got to hit the gas.

David Rice: That’s interesting. You know, cause like I always think about, we talk all the time about like objectives, key results, goals, all these things. Right? And every meaningful thing I think I’ve ever done it’s always like the journey was the part, not necessarily the end destination.

The journey had all the lessons and the value and the growth and the things that I learned, you know? So maybe it’s kind of the same thing.

Bob Sutton: It’s funny you say that because, so this is my 8th business ebook and gee, I hope people buy it. And you know, I want them to listen to this show and I want them to get excited.

I want them to go and buy it. But first of all, it took me years to love the process of writing it. And now since part of promoting a book, I get to meet interesting people like you and I just try to enjoy the process and whatever happens, happens with the outcome. Because I can’t control the outcome anyways, and I can control a little bit of the process.

So, but yeah, that’s true.

David Rice: In the book, you refer to friction fixers as a trustee of other people’s time. And I really like that. Particularly, there’s this section about poser tricks or hollow acts that undermine friction fixing as I read that, but I couldn’t help but feel like, wow, I’ve had a lot of these things done to me by bad managers over the years, particularly people searching for someone to blame.

So I’m curious, what are some memorable examples that you’ve seen of those tricks?

Bob Sutton: You and I both have been victims and maybe even some of the perpetrators of this stuff because it’s hard to get through organizational life without doing it to other people, even accidentally. I’m sure that I’ve accidentally wasted a lot of my students time over the years.

But the way that I got interested in this, it actually goes way back to my very first business book with my co-author, Jeff Pfeffer, The Knowing-Doing Gap. And we have a chapter there that’s about using talk as a substitute for action or the smart talk trap is what we eventually called it. So the way I got interested in this was my, this is my very first consulting job ever with a top management team.

This is long time ago. This is 25 years ago or so. And I would fly to the Midwest to this big manufacturing corporation. I watch the senior team in action. And the thing that I remember most is that they kept making the same decision over and over, and the decision was to put the name of their product on their product.

I don’t think this is a trivial decision. And the other thing I realized after about three meetings is they weren’t writing anything down. And they would not start meetings by saying, well, what did we decide last time and what should we do this time? And I just realized that they were just using talk as a substitute for action.

That for them, just saying smart things in meetings was how you got ahead and not to bash the management consultants. A lot of them, my best friends are management consultants and I’m a management consultant sometimes. But I think the fact that there was one or two manufacturing people in 10 management consultants on the former management consultants in the top team was related to that.

Because my friends are in management consultants when they give you their advice and they just leave, they’re done. That’s what they sell. And so that’s how I got interested in the Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote about the smart talk trap. And then eventually we saw that friction fixers are not people who talk about what should be done or come up with flashy ideas. They actually focus on implementation.

I don’t like that word execution. That reminds me of a capital punishment or something. But they do focus on implementing on a talk that motivates action. So people who are friction fixers are people who actually do stuff. And that’s why we talked about my friend, Becky Margiotta, US army officer, and she led a movement that found homes for a hundred thousand homeless Americans, a hundred thousand homes campaign.

And as we talk about in the book that they figured out there was a difference between the posers and the doers. They called them chicken effers because when Becky was a captain, there’s something that was messed up. Her colonel would say to her, who’s this chicken, which meant whose responsibility is it to fix it and who can fix it?

And so she gave this little metal rooster as a reward to people in the campaign who actually found homes for homeless people. That was a definition of action in this campaign versus she called them hollow Easter bunnies. Those are the people who would show up at meetings and just talk and talk and talk and never actually implement it.

So that to us for getting rid of friction, people who actually do stuff are important.

David Rice: You have this in the book, there’s this help pyramid and at the bottom three levels, they’re really more of about helping people deal with friction in healthy ways, whereas the top two levels are really more focused on preventing and curing friction troubles.

I want to do a little back and forth around these, if that’s all right. Cause what I’ll do is I’ll say a term and if you could give us a short anecdote or story about some of the most interesting or ridiculous examples you’ve seen of this. So we’ll start with executive magnification.

Bob Sutton: I was raised as an organizational theorist that, Oh, when you’re at the top, leaders are always complaining about resistance to change.

Oh, they’re, I don’t know, I’m implementing a quality movement or design thinking. And it’s the right thing to do and they’re not doing it. But one of the things, and there’s very good evidence about this, it’s just how baboon troops work too, that when you’re in a hierarchy, people pay really a lot of attention to the top dogs because they can do wonderful and terrible things to us.

So you watch them really closely. So the baboon literature is that the, in a baboon troop, the average troop member looks up at the alpha male every 30 or 40 seconds because they can hurt them, they can help them, they can bring them food, blah, blah, blah. So if you bring this into hierarchical life, there’s all these examples.

And we have some long examples in the book of executives who entire movement started because they complained about something, but perhaps my favorite one was the CEO of a fortune 10 company. And I remember talking to somebody who was on his team and what this guy did was just randomly, right after he took over as CEO, there’s a breakfast meeting and he just wondered idly where the blueberry muffins were.

He just said, Oh, there’s no blueberry muffins. And so in the notes about him became likes blueberry muffins. And it took him years to figure out that every breakfast meeting he ever went to, there was huge piles of blueberry muffins. He didn’t even like blueberry muffins that much. And that notion that when you’re in a position of power, that being careful that people are watching you so closely that you’ll say stuff you’ll just forget or isn’t very important to you, it’ll get magnified to something.

There’s so much research on resistance to change, but I don’t think there’s much research on sort of magnification when people get overly enthusiastic about what they’re doing and get you into trouble. That’s just one thing that oblivious leaders do is they set things off, they have no intention of setting off at all.

David Rice: All right. The next one would be decision amnesia.

Bob Sutton: So decision amnesia is this tendency where in some organizations that people make the decision and everybody leaves the meeting and they think it’s done. And then it gets raised again and two kinds of reasons that we see decision amnesia get raised.

One is because people kind of forget. The other one is that there’s one or two people who don’t like the decision so they’re trying to overturn it. Sometimes it’s the CEO doesn’t like the decision where they pretend that they’re being democratic. And then they make the decision and then they come back and they say, I didn’t really like that.

Let’s revisit one more time where they’re insecure, they want to reverse it.

David Rice: All right. And the last one, cookie licking, maybe my favorite.

Bob Sutton: This was brought to us, we had this research assistant for a background and her name was Rebecca Hein. She started as an undergraduate. She worked through Stanford, got a PhD.

Now she’s running something called the Asana Work Innovation Lab and she’s hiring Stanford professors. I’m not kidding. So she’s gone full circle. So early on in the process, I’m talking to Rebecca, like what leads to clue of this executive? She said, cookie licking. I said, what are you talking about?

She said, this actually, it’s partly Microsoft parlance, or it’s just like when little kids, they lick the cookie so nobody else can use it. It’s calling dibs on something. So other people can’t do it. In the classic example where we saw was there’s lots of different startups in Silicon Valley. And Larry Page was definitely guilty of this.

It Google in the early days, this is where the CEO in the early days of the company insists on interviewing every candidate before they’re giving a job offer. Well, that made sense for Google when they had 5,000, maybe even 300-400 people. But my understanding is Larry Page wanted to be involved in those decisions well after they had 1,000 employees, which just doesn’t make any sense.

It slows down the whole situation and then you end up losing candidates who go somewhere else who you want to keep. So cookie licking is just calling dibs on thing and just becoming the bottleneck in the process, even though it isn’t necessarily something you ever intend to do.

David Rice: Those are all really great examples.

Bob Sutton: Yeah. Well, I hate to say it. I, as a co-author in articles, I often am the cookie licker because I don’t, I’m so controlling poor Huggy, my co-author. I’m sure I did this to him like 3000 times during the course of this book. Which is that, no, no, no, no, I’ll write that. Well, it maybe would’ve been better if I didn’t lick so many cookies during the course of this book. So, I’m guilty.

David Rice: In recent years, we’ve heard a lot about flattening hierarchies. I actually experienced this. I worked for an organization where they flattened the marketing department down to just two levels and it created this like mass confusion, especially for people who thought they were in the group that sat higher up, but they weren’t.

It was sort of like, well, so is there nothing that I can ascend into now? But you talk in the book about hierarchy being inevitable, not just useful. So take us through that a bit. And for our audience that is sitting in that startup space where they can still design their hierarchies, what advice would you give them as they look to innovate around how they structure personnel?

Bob Sutton: There are organizations that are more hierarchical and have more levels then there are fewer levels than others. So I’m not saying that more is better. I’m saying some is inevitable. And the fact is there’s all of this research, like researchers will try to create leaderless groups and tell them they all have equal authority.

They fight like crazy over who’s in charge informally. It’s one of the best ways to create conflict and inefficiency in just a small group is to tell them they have no leader and everybody has the same amount of authority and they ended up fighting over. So the problem with hierarchy is you just need it to organize human beings.

And this is the basic rule. People may say bureaucracy is a dirty word, but the fact is, as much as all of us hate bureaucracy, when you have people, you have to break them into sub-groups after a certain amount of size. You have to figure out who has final decision authority, and you have to have some rules.

I’m sorry, there’s just no other way to run a human organization. And so you might as well have a logical number of hierarchical levels. You might as well have reasonable breakdowns and understanding who has the final decision is really important. And one thing we do talk about in the book, and this is something that I was co-author of a piece that was in Harvard Business Review at the beginning of the year on this, is that what great leaders do is rather than saying, oh, the hierarchy is fixed.

And I’m in charge all the time, or I’m delegating everything that would be no hierarchy, even though even that case, the leader is doing the delegation that what they do is they flex the hierarchy. And my co-author, Lindy Greer, did some studies with 10 startups. And what she found was that the best CEOs of startups don’t insist on making every decision and don’t delegate all the time, they flex.

So what they do is they say, okay, so let’s brainstorm, let’s have an argument or a debate about the best way to do this. Let’s get ideas from people. And then they say, timeout, here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s who’s going to do it. And they go. Or one of the most important things for hierarchy, and this is something that’s really important.

You can look at even international relations and my late dissertation advisor, Bob Kahn, talked about this a lot, is that when there is conflict, whether it’s in a group or at a national level or international level, hierarchy, knowing who is in charge and who has the most power tends to work. Because let’s say in a group dynamics, the boss can jump in and say, let’s stop arguing and let’s move forward. This isn’t useful.

And when somebody has more authority, when they say that it works, but there’s no way I can figure out to organize human beings without having some pecking order or apes or dogs pick sort of your mammal. So, and I wish it wasn’t true. I wish we were all equal and there are more benevolent versus more nasty hierarchies.

And I want them to be more human and so forth, but I don’t know how to organize a human organization without it.

David Rice: So, you know, as organizations grow, we end up spending a lot of time talking about collaboration. There’s one part in the book I really like where you talk about systems of interdependence and you have, so for the listener, you have reciprocal interdependence or a system where people, teams, silos, whatever it may be, they have to constantly adjust back and forth to one another as the work unfolds.

It’s like a soccer team. Then there’s the pooled interdependence, and that’s when organizations roll up the separate independent efforts of people or whole teams. So the example there that Bob gives is the gymnastics team in the Olympic. So you point out that the second actually requires a lot less because, but it sounds counterintuitive for people working in corporate spaces where we’ve been talking about breaking down silos and using collaboration to fuel innovation for decades.

Kind of talk to me about the benefit of these systems and when to rely on each.

Bob Sutton: Well, first of all, this is a general design, and I’m not saying that you should do everything you can to reduce interdependence. When people need to share information, it’s important that they do it. It may be empowering and so forth, but the fact is that in fact, even one of my co-authors defined interdependence. Interdependence means that things don’t come out the way you want them to, it’s almost by like what my wife and I are having a discussion today about whether to go out for dinner, whether to order food in or to cook dinner.

I have a clear preference, but I’m not winning. And that’s that’s sort of like how life is. And so the more interdependence you have in some ways, it’s all these people you have to check with and there are issues with it. And I’ll tell you a little story. This may be referred in the book, but I saw her at a Halloween party, so it’s more updated.

So I have a friend, Kim Scott, she’s famous for writing a book called Radical Candor and Kim had a long career in corporate America. And she just describes going from Google and she said, Google, I would get 500 emails a day from different groups about different things and so forth. And then she moves to Apple.

Apple is famous for its secrecy, scared, silent is sometimes what they say. It’s amazing how secretive Apple is. And my friends who would Apple say, you can only have lunch with your group because you’re not allowed to talk to anybody else. That’s how secretive they are. So Kim gets there and she said, I would get five emails a day if I was lucky.

It usually would be three cause I, they’d only come from my team. I couldn’t talk to anybody else. And she said, it was amazing how much work I got done because I didn’t have to be involved in everything else. And the way that she put it is that at Google, the concept of staying in your lane is something that nobody really understood at all.

And at Apple, that’s the way the whole company was ran. It just a small aside where I first really heard about this. I had this guy in class. He took a year off to do some classes at Stanford. His name’s Chris Espinoza. Chris Espinoza is employee number eight at Apple. He’s still there. And the reason he’s employee number eight is that he was going to high school when he was working with the two Steve’s and he got back to work at three thirty after high school and they’d given away the first seven employee numbers.

So he’s employee number eight and he says, I’m the original Apple employee, the only original one left, and I can only get into 5% of the spaces with my badge because there’s so much secrecy. It’s not like I’m a huge Apple fan, but if we look at Apple, they’re secretive. They’re really specialized.

They don’t really share information and it’s only a few very senior executives who know everything that’s going on. I once had a guy who was a very senior executive say to me, it may be that Tim Cook and Johnny Ive may be the only two people in the company who know everything that’s in the next iPhone.

I mean, and Apple’s doing okay, you know. And it’s not a particularly inhuman organization either. It’s like notion that there’s different ways to organize companies. And I’m not saying everybody should be like Apple. I wouldn’t want to work in such a secretive kind of paranoia type place. But there’s different solutions that actually work.

And in that case, reduce friction.

David Rice: Before we go, there’s two things we always like to do here. The first is I want to give you a chance to tell people more about, where they can connect with you and where they can pick up a copy of the book.

Bob Sutton: Well, it’s easy to buy the book, The Friction Project. The best place probably to connect with me is either on LinkedIn or my website is bobsutton.net, but I’m very active on LinkedIn. Honestly, I don’t know the future of Twitter/X. I guess I have 60 something thousand followers on Twitter/X. I think at least two thirds of them are bots from other countries or something, but I am also active on Twitter and learning threads.

But the best place to find me now is probably LinkedIn and I’m pretty active.

David Rice: All right. The second thing is we started a little tradition here on the podcast where you get to ask me a question. So I want to turn it over to you and be what you want to ask. Anything you want.

Bob Sutton: Here’s the question I want to ask you. You spent a few years in corporate America. If you could go back and give one piece of advice to your 25 year old self, what would you do?

David Rice: Don’t speak unless you have something to add, especially in the first five years. Just be the fly on the wall, you know, learn, learn, just wait. Because what happened is we talked a little bit about, people talking and they say a lot of things, but they don’t actually say anything. You’re, you feel like you’re forced or you have to speak in a meeting.

Well, that’s becomes one of the habits you pick up is you start saying things and you’re like, that didn’t even mean anything. I don’t even know what I meant. I would go back and tell him to turn that off and just be comfortable being quiet and leave in the room.

Bob Sutton: You know, who, um, Dan Lyon, he was sort of like the fake Steve jobs for years.

He was one of the writers on Silicon Valley. He’s written a number of books. So his last book is STFU. That’s the name of it. And he basically says I talk like crazy and I really needed to STFU and to editorialize, I hardly ever mentioned his name, but I think Elon Musk would benefit if he filed that a little bit more close, he’d benefit himself and others.

And possibly the Tesla stock price forget Twitter/X or whatever it’s called now.

David Rice: All right. Well, that is all we have time for today, Bob. I want to thank you for joining us.

Bob Sutton: Thank goodness. We have time to be quiet. Thank you so much. Nice to talk to you, David.

David Rice: Absolutely. And listeners, if you want to keep up with all things people, operations, and HR, and you’re not already subscribed to our newsletter, head on over to peoplemanagingpeople.com/subscribe and get signed up.

Until next time, book a spa day, drink some hot cocoa. Be well.