Leader as 'friction fixer'

THE FRICTION PROJECT: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easy and the Wrong Things Harder

Author: Robert I Sutton and Huggy Rao

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Pages: 304

Price: Rs 799

What are the core roles of a leader? Too many are listed and written about. But have you heard of a role as a “friction fixer”?

Leadership is, in some ways, an odd subject when compared to finance or engineering. What you see is not what there is, and what you have been taught is not necessarily what will work. There is a strong tendency to not do what you know needs doing. In this sense, leadership is akin to life itself. Issues unravel, you try to solve them, some actions work, and some do not, so you work at it all over again.
 

In the book under review, the authors observe that organisations should be filled with people who make the right things easier and the wrong things harder. Leaders should reduce the “bad” friction in their organisation so that the organisational parts are better lubricated; equally, they introduce “good” friction into joints that should be slowed down.
 

In making the right things easier, leaders solve operational irritants and niggling problems by “walking around”. The book cites how in the Hewlett Packard of the 1970s, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard would visit employees at their workplace. They would talk about their work challenges—a practice which a former HP senior leader captured in the colourful phrase, “We needed less of MBA and more of MBWA, management by wandering around.”
 

Here is an example from my experience. Former Hindustan Lever Chairman, Ashok Ganguly, recalls a switch in his early career from scientific research to an unfamiliar manufactu­ring role. “The only way I could learn the details of the new role and be seen to be helping my team was to turn up unannounced during the night shift of the factory, share a chai with some operators and supervisors, and chat with them about their shop floor work.” This, too, is an example of lessening “bad” friction joints.
 

There can also be value by introducing friction. The book cites the case of chemical manufacturer Rohm and Haas (now part of Dow Chemicals), which taught its leaders that when they face a decision with broad and enduring consequences, they should slow down and abandon the general tendency for speedy action. The company preached the “Five Voices” method to assess the impact on—Customer, Employee, Shareholder, Community and Process.
 

From my experience at Hindustan Unilever, I recall a deliberately placed friction. During the price control and cost saving pressures of the 1970s and 1980s, the internal procedure to recruit even a junior staffer was so cumbersome that a line manager avoided undertaking the pain of the process.
 

Since I have been associated with a lubricating oil company for over two decades, I refer to friction-fixing as the “tribology” of management organisa­tions. Now what is that jargon? Tribology in the language of lube oil companies is the science of understanding friction, lubrication, and wear.  

This book is all about improving the tribology of organisations and the role of the leader in that action. 

Impressive jargon?
 

Unintelligible jargon is what the book refers to as “Jargon Monoxide.” Leaders use seemingly impressive terminology like “let us leverage our core competencies to create synergies that move the needle” or “elucidating the antecedents of upright striding vertical bipedality on horizontal terrestrial substrates by non-human primates” (it means learn how gorillas and monkeys walk on the ground). With the advances in data handling and intelligent technologies, acronyms like LLM, Industry 2.0, GenAI, and AGILE are used quite commonly. These are valuable technologies, but, after a stage, “decision-making and coordination suffer, giving rise to dysfunctional conflict because people don’t quite know what to do, and how to do it,” according to the authors.

In 2001, 17 software developers published “The Manifesto for Agile Software,” emphasising (i) individuals and interactions over processes and tools (ii) working software over comprehensive documentation (iii) customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and (iv) responding to change over sticking to a plan. Clearly the agile manifesto has played a crucial role for companies like Adobe, Google, and Salesforce. But a confounding babble has also developed around agile organisations and agile leadership.
 

The last part of a book is a good place to taste sanity again. The Friction Project relies on three principles. First, leaders fervently believe that they are trustees of other people’s time; hence, they are constantly at the task of diminishing obstacles to good work, and placing friction wherever slowing down is a positive. Second, leaders own friction-fixing as a key role and hold themselves accountable for the results. Third, designing and updating organisational structure is a high form of friction-fixing. The authors have been interviewed in the strategy + business magazine of April 8, 2024. Expanding on a point they make in the book, they said that leaders tend to “add” processes, things, and controls, but do not adequately consider how to subtract existing processes, things, and controls.

In this regard, leaders are just as we all behave at home: We accumulate new things at a much faster rate than we dispose of things we no longer need. On rare occasions, such as when we are transferred or face retirement, we do a reluctant spring-cleaning; funnily, soon, we find the need to refer to a book or wear a pair of trousers that we had recently junked! Such is the nature of organisations. Successful friction-fixers are assured of a long-lasting functional job that is for sure.

The reviewer is an author and corporate commentator