Box 16a

Friction is just about everywhere you look. But if you’re the person in charge, it’s your job to minimize it as much as possible. Every transaction, customer engagement, product delivery, etc., is going to 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 ten people probably wouldn’t be worthwhile for them to resolve.

On the other hand, internal friction happens within your organization. Usually, it’s the result of 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 — great communication, everyone knew their role, and there was a general understanding of where the bumpy areas were, and how those issues were to be dealt with.

My client took this to mean that they had great, easily transferable processes. Not so. What they had was 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’d believed.

When presented with the same problem, the first team would go left, while the second team decided that 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 the workarounds. If they hadn’t tried to scale, who knows if they’d have found those improvements?

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 if everything was placed in its corresponding box. 

That sounds great in theory, but in practice, this salesperson doesn’t know what to put in box 16a, and that’s 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 appreciate that. Your role is to work that out for everyone. That might be you doing it, or it 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 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 and you can walk into a department and ask them what the dumbest thing they do all day is. 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 be able to 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 turned out to be a great way to make a good first impression with the new team as well as reducing friction with minimal costs, which benefited the organization, the team, and our customers.

Ultimately, the higher in the ranks that I rose, 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 get done instead of being caught up shouting expletives at a screen because they aren’t able to fill out box 16a.