Why bosses should tell employees to slow down more often
The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder." Yet in the course of our research, we also learned that the opposite lesson is just as important: The best bosses don’t strive to build entirely frictionless organizations. Instead, they know when and how to help their charges to slow down. In effect, they know what every race-car driver knows: If you want to win, tapping the brakes at the right times is as important as pushing the pedal to the metal.
Hitting the brakes gives employees time to identify big and small issues that undermine the mission, and to figure out where to focus their efforts. We all know the feeling of rushing into fix something before we even know what’s going on. And we know what happens: We not only don’t fix anything, but we make the problem worse.
The trick, of course, is to know when to tap (or slam on) the brakes and when to step on the gas. To that end, our research has uncovered eight occasions when smart bosses urge people to slow down. These are times when it makes sense to encourage employees (and ourselves) to pause to think and develop a deeper understanding, which enables us to make better decisions, and do better—and often faster—work later.
It can even allow us to take a few moments to enjoy the good things in life. Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com’s founder and former CEO, says leaders should ask themselves whether decisions are “one way" or “two way" doors. As he wrote to Amazon shareholders in 2015, one-way doors are “consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible"—things where “if you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before." These one-way decisions “must be made
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