Paradoxically, then, the more your high-priority interrupts involve catching your people doing things wrong (so you can fix them), the less productive each person will become in the short term, and the less growth you’ll see from your team members in the long run. Finding itself in negative-criticism territory, the human brain stiffens, tenses, and—in meaningful ways—resists improvement. Machines and processes don’t do that. You can fix a machine, you can fix a process, but you can’t fix a person in the same way—people aren’t toasters. So, when it comes to your people, what should be your high-priority interrupt? If what you want is improvement, then it should be whenever someone on your team does something that really works. The goal is to consciously spend your days alert for those times when someone on your team does something so easily and effectively that it rocks you, just a little, and then to find a way of telling that person what you just saw.

When an organization confronts a large number of novel problems, a top-down structure is likely to be a choke point. As issues get escalated, problems pile up on the doorstep of senior leaders who often lack the experience and bandwidth to make smart, speedy decisions. Over time, the backlog grows and the pace of decision making decelerates. Stratification is the enemy of speed.

8. Fast and Frenzied: When and How to Apply Good Friction

“Putting the pedal to the metal is dangerous for organizations, too. London Business School’s Dana Kanze and her colleagues compared managers who were urged by their leaders to rush ahead, to focus on “locomotion goals,” to managers who were urged to slow down and evaluate their actions, to focus on “assessment goals.

As the damage caused by excessive speed ripples throughout an organization, it can turn into a vicious downward spiral that, once it gains momentum, is hard for leaders to reverse. As harried leaders make bad decisions and errors that create more pressing problems that are left unsolved, and one overwhelmed member after another burns out, turns selfish and nasty, makes more flawed decisions, and becomes less creative, everyone tangled up with the organization suffers.

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

This is particularly true with respect to time spent working with people, which is, of course, a central task in the work of the executive. People are time-consumers. And most people are time-wasters.

To spend a few minutes with people is simply not productive. If one wants to get anything across, one has to spend a fairly large minimum quantum of time. The manager who thinks that he can discuss the plans, direction, and performance of one of his subordinates in fifteen minutes—and many managers believe this—is just deceiving himself. If one wants to get to the point of having an impact, one needs probably at least an hour and usually much more. And if one has to establish a human relationship, one needs infinitely more time.