Five Signs Organizational Friction Is Slowing Results.

Most organizations I work with are putting massive amounts of effort into what they do. Even though people are busy juggling multiple priorities and working long hours, the important work still takes longer than it should and they’re not seeing the results they need.

I often hear leaders say things like, “There’s just too much going on,” or “If one more thing gets added, I think it’s going to crush my team.”

Strategic initiatives, and the important work supporting them, get pushed aside because something more urgent comes up. Decisions that should take days end up taking weeks and priorities keep getting added with little being removed.

This drag on execution and results is what I think of as organizational friction. The challenge is looking at how to address it best, so strategy turns into results.

Some of the friction is unavoidable and out of our direct control. Organizations today are dealing with talent shortages, tariffs, supply chain disruption, new technology, changing customer expectations and a level of uncertainty that isn’t going away anytime soon.

While you can’t control all of that, you can control how your organization responds to it.

Sometimes the biggest obstacles to execution are not outside the organization at all. They are built into the way organizations operate.

Here are five signs that friction may be slowing your organization down.

Every organization is faced with a barrage of customer issues, employee problems, operational surprises and things that need attention now. Spending time addressing these is what I call firefighting and it’s a natural part of leadership.

The trouble starts when firefighting becomes the way the organization operates every day, all day. The organization becomes consumed by what needs attention today, leaving too little room for the work that will shape tomorrow.

I regularly hear leaders say they cannot get to the more strategic work because they are constantly dealing with whatever is most urgent that day. At the same time, new priorities keep being added and very little comes off the list.

Eventually people stop believing that the word “priority” means much at all.

One organization I worked with had committed dedicated resources to a longer-term major strategic initiative. It was big, important and, like many large projects, it took longer than expected and the scope grew.

Dedicating those resources was a difficult and bold decision but it made sense even though it meant they were not available for other projects people wanted completed.

Eventually, the pressure for resources became too much. Senior leadership decided the resources could start working on some of those other projects again.

On the surface, that felt practical because there were legitimate needs elsewhere in the organization.

But there was a catch. The original strategic initiative still wasn’t finished. The strategy didn’t change; the resource allocation did.

Now there were fewer people working on it, while those same people were also spread across additional work. The work dragged on even longer and the quality was put at risk.

This happens more often than organizations like to admit. Leaders identify something as strategically important, commit resources to it and then slowly chip away at that commitment when operational pressure increases.

Resource allocation is often a much better indication of an organization’s real priorities than anything written in a strategic plan.

One of the fastest ways to slow execution is to create structure that makes people wait for permission.

I worked with one organization where major decisions had to go through an executive committee before eventually reaching the CEO. That meant decisions often had to wait for the committee before they could move forward.

A new CEO came in and removed the committee and his message was essentially: make the decisions in your departments. If something genuinely needs to come to me, bring it to me. Otherwise, own it.

Things started moving faster because people also started owning their decisions.

But decision friction isn’t always caused by bureaucracy.

Sometimes leaders are unsure who has authority. Sometimes more junior leaders have learned that their decisions will be second-guessed by someone above them, so they just don’t make them.

Even with the authority, sometimes people are simply uncomfortable making a call when the answer is not obvious. This is becoming increasingly important today as leaders are faced with making decisions in conditions of constant change. There is often incomplete information and no obvious “right” answer.

Under those conditions, consensus can feel safer. If ten people supported the decision, it is a lot easier to explain later if it did not work. That becomes a problem when every difficult decision gets pushed to a committee.

Alignment can be deceptive.

A leadership team can meet, have a great discussion, all agree on the direction and feel positive about the direction they’re headed. Then, they go back to their own functional areas and start implementing.

Marketing applies a marketing lens. Finance applies a finance lens. IT, operations, product management, etc. all bring their own perspectives. There’s nothing wrong with this per se because all of these perspectives matter. The problem is when those leaders optimize for their own function instead of for what the organization is trying to accomplish together (emphasis on together).

Suddenly, the shared strategic priority has five different interpretations. Even though everyone
thought they were aligned; their execution reveals that they weren’t.

This is one reason I’m cautious when leadership teams tell me, “We’re aligned on that.”

Maybe.

The better test is what happens after the meeting.

Are people making decisions based on the same priorities? Are functions making sensible trade-offs for the organization as a whole? Are teams moving in the same direction when those priorities start competing with their own functional goals?

Agreement in the room is only the beginning.

Organizations need to be more agile than they were 10 years ago. For many, the days of relying on ten-year, or even five-year, strategic plans no longer matches today’s reality

Today, I see organizations where a three-year strategy needs to be reviewed every year, and in some environments, leaders may need to reassess direction every six months depending on the volatility of their industry.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In fact, refusing to change course when the world changes around you can be far more dangerous.

Where I see friction appear is when leadership changes direction or adds new priorities without making equally clear decisions about what will stop. People are told what matters now and they are not always told what no longer matters.

So the list of priorities grows while teams try to protect yesterday’s priorities while responding to today’s. Eventually, something gives, and its usually capacity.

One question a leadership team could ask much more often is: What are we going to stop doing?

It is easy to ask what the organization should do next. The harder leadership decision is deciding what should no longer consume time, money and attention.