How - Dov Seidman [64]
Try as she might, she can’t get the e-mail, and its possible implications, out of her thoughts; it pulls her head out of the game and begins to affect her productivity. Uncertain, she can’t help but forward the e-mail to others to get their opinions. She discusses it with friends, and worries about her position and what she would need to do to protect it: all the classic signs of distraction. The dissonance it breeds is equally destructive. Instead of the calm confidence and trust in her position she formerly felt, now her workdays are filled with insecurity and tension. She questions her choices and spends more time making them, sacrificing some of the nimble agility that made her such an asset to the company.
Finally, the emotions she feels make it impossible for her to relate to her boss in a free and unfettered way. Their relationship becomes uncomfortable, a fact noted by the rest of her team. What had once been a smooth-running unit begins to falter. Instead of filling the synapses between them with trust and support, this boss has just gunked up the works. Communication breaks down as spaces previously filled with trust became clouded with doubt. Political tensions arise, people start bickering, and morale plummets. The friction worsens as people become irritated or insulted, then get more people involved, who in turn grow counteraggressive, clouding the synapses with more real conflict.
It’s difficult to gauge who is hurt worse by this political maneuver (if, in fact, it is a maneuver), the woman whose productivity suffers or her boss, who sacrificed the cohesion of the entire unit on the altar of his own insecurity. Perhaps the e-mail was entirely innocent and the whole situation could have been avoided if the boss had found a more direct and transparent way to reach out, if he had gotten his HOWs right. In either case, what is perfectly clear is how destructive these forces can be. In a transparent world, where your HOWs are as closely scrutinized as your WHATs, keeping the interpersonal synapses between you and your co-workers in an optimal condition for making Waves is crucial to meaningful action. It takes constant care and attention. When distraction, dissonance, and cynicism overflow the boundaries of the mind and manifest themselves in conduct they contaminate these spaces. That’s where friction comes from.
In the mechanical world, friction is the force that occurs when two surfaces in contact rub against one another in oppositional ways. In organizations, it results when the forces of distraction and dissonance infect the spaces between people trying to work together. We know from the laws of mechanics that friction slows progress. Friction extracts energy from the system and creates a by-product: heat—wasted energy released into the atmosphere. Excess heat makes people uncomfortable. It requires more energy—in the form of air-conditioning—to cool things down. Without stretching this metaphor too far, we all know what happens to worker productivity when people are hot under the collar. We know, too, how much additional managerial energy it requires to keep an overheated working atmosphere cool and comfortable.
Though distraction, dissonance, and friction can each develop independently in an organization, often they compound each other, like in the situation just described, and set off a self-perpetuating spiral of destruction. Small or large distractions set up powerful dissonance that leads to overt friction. If the situation continues to deteriorate, the heat generated by friction will lead to combustion. Suddenly, your energy will be diverted from the task at hand or there will be two teams working at odds where there used to be one in common purpose. Thriving in a world of HOW involves recognizing and avoiding the conditions that cause distraction, dissonance, and friction; learning to break these