*Photo of Matt Hamilton Olympic Gold Medalist
The Olympic sport of curling must be one of the most bizarre sports ever invented.
Every time I see it on TV, I think to myself, how does someone get into this? Especially if they are the person with the scrubbing tool!
If you aren’t familiar, the sport is similar to shuffleboard where the goal is to slide the “rock” into a target circle called “the house.” You compete with another team who can knock your rocks out of the target area.
But instead of wood like shuffle board, the entire game takes place on ice.
One player takes a shot by sliding the rock, while the other member of the same team frantically polishes the ice with something that looks like a giant brush or sponge. Since the surface of the ice gets rough, dirty, and builds up gunk over time, the job of the sweeper is to reduce surface friction for a better shot.
The image teaches a valuable leadership lesson.
Every leader should see themselves as a “sweeper” on a curling team by reducing aggravating points of friction for their team members whenever possible.
Let me give you a practical example from my current team.
We spent several years trying to teach our team how to use a very cumbersome and complicated medical record (that was outside our organization).
We tried everything. We tried expert trainers, we tried in-house experts, we tried peer consultants. We made the trainings optional. Then we made them mandatory. Then we made them part of our annual training experience every year.
But nothing seemed to work. People continued to have significant difficulty using it. Credentials or passwords always seemed to expire. We couldn’t get tech support because the record was outside of our organization.
People complained—and loudly.
During every annual job survey, people came back in resounding accord—”this thing is the worst part of our job experience.”
And we finally listened.
Our leadership team got together and decided to dedicate a few highly trained people that would pull all the records and simply email them to our experts.
We would no longer subject them to mind-numbing trainings, complicated digital rabbit holes, and frustrating disruptive technology.
This decision freed up their precious time and energy to focus on writing complicated and detailed psychological evaluations for the courts—the job they had been specifically hired for.
It turned out to be one of the most important organizational changes we have ever made.
The complaints went away almost instantaneously, and job satisfaction went up.
Why didn’t we do this sooner?
It’s a question worth pondering.
I am embarrassed to say that I hadn’t really even considered it.
As a compulsive rule-follower, people pleaser, and loyal government worker, I guess there was part of me that always felt we had no choice. But that was just an errant perception.
The whole experience, and subsequent team morale boost, opened my mind up to more experimentation and a much greater willingness to challenge the status quo by asking more frequently—“Do we really need to do this?”
I’ve had jobs in the past where I felt completely strangled by endless meetings, boring mandatory trainings, oceans of email, or rigid bureaucratic processes.
That kind of work environment will burn nearly anyone out eventually. It choked creativity, deep thinking, and meaningful work.
Especially after all the time and money I had invested in becoming a psychologist, I longed to focus most of my time related to my area of expertise—not doing things that nearly anyone else could do without specialized training.
The Friction Project
Robert Sutton is an organizational psychologist, Stanford professor of management, and best-selling author. For the past few years he has been helping lead “The Friction Project” which consists of studies, experts, leaders, researchers, and analysis of academic and practical work.
In a recent Harvard Business Review article (February 2024) he and his colleagues write about the vicious organizational problem of “addition sickness.” You can probably guess what it means.
Addition sickness is when an organization just adds too many projects; especially things that frustrate or exhaust people. Projects pile up and few things are ever subtracted.
Good leaders make this a primary area of focus—by removing irritating and unnecessary facets of the work their team members do.
The highest functioning organizations find ways to permit their employees to do the work best suited for them while eliminating the majority of low-value time-wasting tasks.
One major caveat is that not all work should be frictionless. Things like deep states of creativity, building emotional trust, or innovation should involve long hours or hard thinking, errors, growth, and learning. That is not the kind of friction that burns people out.
When rock star team members are free to make their highest contributions more often, they stay longer. And good employees staying longer trumps nearly every other organizational strategy.
Like the Olympic curling teams, the wise leader looks at the path ahead and sweeps furiously to remove friction points for those they lead.
My former boss used to say it was the leader’s primary job to “remove any obstacles for those on the front lines” so that they could more easily do the work.
I had no idea the wisdom of this 15 years ago when he shared this idea on my first day of work as a brand-new supervisor.
Take action now
- The lowest hanging fruit in most organizations is to remove unnecessary meetings. Try experimenting with it for a month. Allow people to skip and see if there is any impact. Change weekly meetings to every other week. Make shorter agendas. Set shorter durations. Reduce the number of people in meetings. Be creative and keep subtracting. If you encounter a problem, you can always add something back.
- Eliminate or shorten boring required trainings. Our organization has switched to self-paced online video trainings that can be done at home. This eases the blow a bit by giving employees the flexibility to complete mundane trainings on their own timeline while at home.
- Implement strategies that reduce the volume of email. On average people spend nearly half of every workday checking email, much of which is not high value or high impact. Anything you can do to train your team to check email 3x per day max, not reply to all, write very short messages, or make a phone call instead, will help. You may also want to reduce or set rules around instant messaging so that people’s work is not fragmented by constant interruptions.
- Ask your team (or your customers) what the most frustrating things are. You could do a focus group, mass email, or anonymous survey to get useful feedback so that employees cannot be identified for being brutally honest. Take a risk and experiment with removing something people frequently find frustrating. Assess the resulting improvement in morale or organizational impacts.
- Make sure the leaders in your organization are working in mostly high–impact zones. Leaders in the organization should, for the most part, be doing work that only they can do. Leaders need to be free to mentor, communicate, envision, coach, or delegate. For that reason, it is especially important that leaders are not overwhelmed with low-value work. Of course, some jobs lend themselves to a leader who can work alongside the team doing the front-line work, but that kind of style can often pull the leader away from essential leadership duties that can only be done by the leader.
Have a great weekend!
Parker
Want more resources?
- Rid Your Organization of Obstacle that Infuriate Everyone HBR
- Subtract by Leidy Klotz
