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.

The lesson, and perhaps the irony, of Tsedal and Sebastian’s study is that executives who deferred to subordinates moved up the pecking order faster than those who refused to bend to their underlings’ will and wisdom: Leaders were granted more power because they gave it away. Yet deference and “flattening” the hierarchy aren’t always the right moves. The University of Michigan’s Lindy Greer shows that the best leaders are adept at “flexing” the hierarchy.

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.

Here are five ways that excessive speed brings out the worst in people, which in turn damages organizations.

1. Burnout

Burned-out employees feel tired, down, frustrated, hopeless, cynical, and numb—and their performance and productivity suffer...

2. Selfishness

When people are in a big hurry, they fixate so much on tasks that they don’t slow down to offer a kind word or lend a hand to others and become oblivious to people who need their help....

3. Bullying

Ohio State’s Ben Tepper developed a measure of abusive supervision more than twenty years ago, which has since been used in many studies on the causes and consequences of such nastiness. Ben’s measure lists fifteen behaviors that nightmare bosses heap on subordinates, including “is rude to me,” “expresses anger at me when he/she is mad for another reason,” “tells me I am incompetent,” and “puts me down in front of others.” Once again, time pressure is a major culprit. Dozens of studies that use this and related measures find that exhausted bosses stressed by constant struggles with deadlines are prone to abuse their subordinates—who respond by becoming anxious, depressed, physically ill, and less productive, and by quitting their jobs...

4. Bad Decisions

When people try to accomplish things too fast, don’t pause to think, and trigger a cycle of recrimination and anxiety, the frenzy imposes a “bandwidth tax” that results in lousy decisions. Worse, their narrow focus on current troubles hinders them from confronting new problems before they get out of control and prevents people from doing the kinds of long-term thinking and planning that separates good friction fixers and organizations from bad ones...

Daniel Kahneman’s research, cited in chapter 2, shows that when you are in a “cognitive minefield,” when you don’t know what to do or things are going badly, it is best to slow down, ask for advice, and weigh pros and cons. The first decision that pops into your mind is probably flawed because it’s based on biases and a shallow understanding of your choices. The hazards of time pressure also pervade research on locomotion, which, as we saw earlier in this chapter, shows that when people fixate on speed, they take shortcuts and even break laws...

5. Kills Creativity

Teresa Amabile and her colleagues reached a similar conclusion after analyzing nine thousand daily diary entries from 177 employees on twenty-two project teams. Theresa’s team developed a nuanced measure of daily creativity based on employee reports of discovery, generating ideas, thinking flexibly, learning, and enhanced self-awareness. Their findings revealed that “when creativity is under the gun, it usually ends up getting killed.” Each day, participants rated how much time pressure they felt on a seven-point scale....

The third leadership principle is organizational design is the highest form of friction fixing. Most of the time, leaders don’t have the luxury of designing a workplace from scratch. So most must find ways to manage in existing and imperfect systems. The bottom three levels of the Help Pyramid in chapter 3 show how leaders can reduce the damage inflicted by badly designed teams and organizations—problems they can’t fix (at least for now). This work entails reframing friction troubles as less soul crushing for victims of lousy systems, helping people navigate bewildering and broken systems, and shielding others from inefficiencies and indignities. This is essential work for leading any friction project because all systems have flaws.