Find the Friction

ask, answer, and act your way to greater productivity, trust, priorities, and impact

Friction is at the core of lack of productivity, inefficient use of capital and talent, missed opportunities, and it can even contribute to cultural issues. To find friction and address it in a prioritized manner, put this mindset and practice in place for yourself and your team: Ask. Answer. Act.

Are you…Launching new products in new channels or markets? Hiring several new executives? Implementing a new technology? Taking over a situation with NOTHING new and need to drive innovation but struggling to prioritize? A new leader for a team? Managing through and acquisition or divestiture?

There is no one path to help you lead better, build trust faster, or drive the highest impact outcomes, but there are best processes and tried and true questions that lead you to the best decisions at any given time.

Building the Ask. Answer. Act. Muscle

I made so many mistakes early in my career (thank goodness!) as a result of constantly leading new teams (most of us had not met in person or worked together prior) in different countries and cultures (where I was often unfamiliar with the language and customs), with a limited time to create a specific outcome (where there were ALWAYS delays). In that situation, you are forced to learn very quickly how to build trust, prioritize, and communicate, 3 skills needed for any leader, but especially leaders in new circumstances accompanied by high growth.

Here’s what it looked like for me in my early 20’s when I was in a sprint of opening franchises around the world:

Put together a team from around the world using only recommendations of others and brief, virtual interactions. Have phone calls (no easy video calling back then) a few times before traveling to the location to coordinate logistics and ask and answer questions.

Arrive onsite, get acclimated (quickly) to the area and culture. Meet the traveling team in person and tour the site for the first time - always surprises! Meet with the local owners, managers, employees, suppliers, media, and other stakeholders and get to know each other. Meet to agree on outline, schedule, and responsibilities. This was all typically in a 24-36 hour period.

Over the next 3-4 weeks, get to work together and help the teams be successful! Throughout each shift or day, find and address issues, facepalm when challenge du jour arrives (construction delayed, permitting denied, equipment damaged, local protest, employee or containers or both stuck in customs), laugh, go to the cooler to cry or yell quickly, smile, work with people 1x1, meet with the team as a group beginning and end of teach shift.

Each day: Feel proud, feel tired, feel annoyed, feel impressed, feel motivated, make list for tomorrow with “Have” “Need” “Notes” for People, Process, Profits (anything $ related). Notes are filled from all the 1x1s, meetings, coaching, and observations. Put in processes to catch the “sparks” before they become fires or missed opportunities: MMDD Log, Daily & Weekly Check-Ins, Hot Shot Rule.

Push people to realize they are capable of more than they know and help them grow in this order: connect/expose/teach/coach/pass the baton/encourage/ hold accountable/promote or dismiss.

Make “net” progress on pieces of the process and with people each day, work through employee ideas, needs, and issue(s), possibly saying goodbye to someone you hoped would work out, manage confusion, learn from it and get better the next day, celebrate wins throughout each shift and again end of each day, correct and redirect real time (no waiting).

Set expectations with local owners and managers of what needs to be done under their stewardship once I left for the next opening. Start these convos early, so you get the full impact of this reaction: “oh shit, this is now on us and our training wheels are being peeled way”. Don’t wait until just before a transition of power, do it early enough that it feels like and onramp/offramp, vs a collision. Prepare a portion of the team to take over their pieces of leadership of the remaining training and to perform as a transition team once I was gone. They, too, must hand the baton over in a few weeks emulating what I just with them.

Repeat every month or two in a new country with mostly new teams (getting better at preventing issues and seeding success each time). Develop people who become leaders of other openings, so I don’t have to go as often, put in “meta” versions of these procedures across the world across the new leader network to stay close to the action, identify friction and wins, and accelerate progress globally.

These conditions were a brutal leadership mirror and trainer. Painful on-site, with so much friction in little and big ways, because so many new elements were colliding. But we learned how to turn it into jazz vs a first-time kids’ band rehearsal. These experiences were powerful, forcing my teams and me to develop tools that became foundational practices. I still use them today to build teams and culture, lead companies, and grow brands and customer trust.

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Here are a few reminders, tools, and processes…

Good Intentions:

We all want to uncover opportunity, remove friction, demonstrate care for ourselves and our people, grow and drive growth, get better over time, make our efforts “worth it”. ROE (Return on Effort or Energy) and ROI (Return on Investment) are related and complementary terms. But we rarely do this intentionally unless there is an obvious problem. It’s human, but in situations of high growth, we have to be smarter than our tendency to enjoy comfort and continuity.

I’ve learned to question success more than failure (so I actually duplicate the right things and don’t blindly duplicate things that had little to do with our success or where our wins may have even happened despite them). This is where building mindsets to find friction (and opportunity) is incredibly helpful. You uncover things before they become massive issues, long-missed opportunities, or costly for culture and business outcomes.

4 Mindsets: Humility, Curiosity, Courage, Confidence

You’ll never have the right playbook for today because it’s different than yesterday. So the key is to strengthen these four mindsets (see the full article on these here) and use them in these ways:

-humility and curiosity to ask the best questions

-culture and courage to give and receive candid answers to those questions

-courage and confidence to act on the most important patterns, even if they are a departure from your previous beliefs and priorities

-humility and courage to share the improvement and journey with the team to evidence the ongoing vulnerability, desire to improve, a bias for action, and prioritization of outcomes over optics and ego

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Tools (Seriously, put these in place right away. Make them your own. You and your teams will be blown away.) As I’ve talked to many of you, I realize I cannot reinforce them enough. The previous newsletters on these topics have deeper dives and templates, but here’s a quick reminder.

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MMDD Log - finding friction by asking the team

What: Made My Day Difficult Log - This is a clipboard, a Slack channel, an upvote/downvote app, an email list, whatever works for your business where team members can write what makes their day difficult. Leaders also fill this out. This helps lead to some discussions on why certain things are being implemented by the company in addition to mapping new/active friction.

How: Each day (or whatever interval you are asking the team to fill it out), review the responses and mentally digest them. Focus on the one or two most commonly mentioned items.

• Ask: Should I, can I, will I address this?

• Answer: Yes, No, Not Now.

• Act: If Yes, fix whatever can be addressed immediately or get the fix started (prioritize the patterns/most mentioned). If No or Not Now, prepare to help the team understand why. Meet with the team to share which items were prioritized/were mentioned by most people.

  • You cannot address everything. This process maps friction and removes it, but it also develops organizational empathy and respect that not all things affect all of the team, and not all things can be addressed at once.

  • Tell them what you addressed, and if it was a no or not now, have a discussion on why and anything that can be done in the interim. Examples: the fix is contingent on another, bigger change coming, budget $, could be a disagreement that it needs to change, what’s causing the friction could be temporary, and the leader can help the team see around that corner, need to give a new leader an opportunity to address it, etc.

When/How Often: In times of notable transition or change, do this every day for a few weeks at a minimum. When things are more stable, move to a few times a week or weekly, but keep it open and available throughout the week.

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HotShot Rule - finding friction and opportunities by reflecting on your own.

The entire process is in this previous Hot Shot Rule post, and the worksheet/template was previously only available in a paying subscriber community post. I’ve unlocked it, made it public for the next 30 days here, as I’m getting so many requests for the template. the summary is, it’s a process of personal reflection where you envision someone you admire in your role tomorrow.

• Ask - what is one thing they would do first and differently to make things better.

• Answer -because it comes to mind quickly when you envision your team or business through someone else’s day 1 eyes.

• Act - take action that thing immediately and tell the team that you practiced the Hot Shot Rule, or you “were thinking” and realized this thing needed to be done/addressed/initiated/ fixed, and how you took or began action.

You should notice the pattern: Ask. Answer. Act. It’s a mindset, a muscle, and a game-changer.

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Check-Ins - finding tectonic friction from talking with team members 1x1

These are different than daily huddles, weekly mini check-ins, or OKR meetings. These are more holistic 1x1s (30-60 minutes) with your direct reports and select skip level employees that you rotate throughout the year, so they are often monthly. The full Check-In template is in this previous post on Checking In. I give you the exact questions to ask and provide context on the format and 1x1 as a whole.

These tools and processes use the benefit of internal and external inputs as well as reflective vs future projecting discussions.

…and PS - all of these can be tweaked to be applied to customers as well. In fact, I find that in fast-growing companies (especially early stage), leaders are often better at staying close to customers than they are their leaders, teams, and employees. Finding and addressing friction for both groups is critical. Building friction-finding and ASK, ANSWER, ACT muscles, and culture across all key stakeholders is a mark of modern leadership and more predictable market success.

Happy friction finding!

-Kat