When Work Quietly Turns Against Your People
Recently, I sat with a senior leader and asked a simple question.
“Where is the work working against your people?”
They didn’t argue with me. They could quickly describe it.
Systems that do not talk to each other.
Metrics that conflict.
Teams that spend more time negotiating handoffs than serving customers.
They acknowledged the constant workarounds, the energy drain, and the gap between what they expect and what their team can realistically deliver.
Then they shrugged.
“That’s just the way it is.”
Two days later, I walked onto a TEDx stage and described the same thing.
I told a story about how often work fights the very people who are trying to do it well. About how employees spend their best energy navigating the job instead of performing the job. About how brand trust depends on consistency, and how consistency collapses when systems quietly push against the promises leaders make.
I did not ask the audience if they agreed. I did not ask for a show of hands. I just described their reality.
The reaction was immediate. Heads nodded. Faces tightened in recognition. You could feel the room saying, “Yes. That is us.”
The leader’s shrug and the audience’s nods are two sides of the same reality.
People feel the friction.
Leaders normalize it.
We already know this is happening. The pressing question is why we still live with it and what leaders with real scope will do differently inside the space they control.
The quiet ways leaders teach people to endure bad work
We rarely decide, explicitly, to make work harder than it needs to be.
No executive stands up and announces, “We are going to burn 20 percent of our people’s energy on avoidable friction.”
We slowly shift there.
It happens in language.
“That’s just the way it is.”
“That’s how things work here.”
“We have to pick our battles.”
Each phrase sounds reasonable on its own. Together, they form a quiet contract. The system will stay as it is. Your job is to adapt.
It happens in who we celebrate.
We spotlight the supervisor who pulls three all-nighters to save a failing project. We hand out awards to the team that hits the number by muscling through broken processes. We praise “grit” and “resilience” while the root causes remain untouched.
Heroics feel good in the moment. They are also evidence that the system failed.
Over time, these patterns teach people a simple lesson: friction is part of the job. Raising it is a risk. Absorbing it is the expectation.
Eventually, they stop pushing. They stop flagging avoidable waste. They do the work the system allows, not the work the values describe.
Meanwhile, leaders in the middle and upper layers carry a specific kind of pressure.
You sit in the rooms where new priorities, tools, and changes pile up. You sit with the teams who must make it all workable. You carry the mandate to “make this work” inside an environment that often fights your own standards.
Acceptance creeps in quietly.
You inherit complexity you did not choose. You see friction you cannot fully control. You feel the political risk of every change you do make. So you pour most of your energy into motivation and effort, because that feels like the part you own.
You start managing around the system instead of managing the system.
That is the pivot point.
When you stop treating friction as fate
The leaders I trust most make a different move.
They stop asking, “Why do people not care more?”
They start asking, “Why did we set things up so that caring costs this much?”
That shift sounds subtle. It is not.
It changes what you notice in meetings. It changes the questions you ask when numbers slip. It changes the way people experience you when they bring you hard truths about how work actually feels.
Most employees already know where work works against them. They talk about it in side chats. They joke about it in ways that are not really jokes. They build informal workarounds and teach new hires the “real way” things get done.
What they rarely see is a leader with real authority walk toward those realities and say, “We are going to treat this as a design problem.”
The rest of this piece is about how to do that in practice without waiting for a corporate initiative.
Start with a clear picture, not a slogan
You do not fix this with a pep talk. You start by understanding where the system breaks the promises you already make.
You can do that in three steps.
1. Name the specific moments that matter
Broad complaints like “our processes are broken” do not help you lead.
List five to seven concrete moments where your part of the business either earns or loses trust. The moments where your brand promise or your values get tested in real time.
Examples:
- The first response when a customer issue hits your team.
- The handoff from sales to implementation or delivery.
- The start of a shift in your operation.
- The way exception requests are handled.
- The moment a frontline employee raises a concern or risk.
For each one, sit with your leadership team and answer:
- What does “good” look like here, in observable terms?
- How often do we actually see that?
- What gets in the way when we miss?
You now have a shared map of where consistency matters most and where the system fails your people most often.
2. Follow where energy leaks, not just where charts dip
Dashboards tell you where outcomes slip. Your people tell you where the work drains them.
Ask a sample of people in those “moments that matter” to keep a short, one-week log.
Have them note only when the design of the work, not their own choices, made things harder than necessary:
- A step that forced rework.
- An approval that added delay without adding real control.
- A tool or login dance for a basic task.
- A conflict between two metrics or priorities.
Then sit down with a small group and review those notes.
You are listening for patterns, not venting. Where the same types of friction show up for different people, you are looking at structural issues, not isolated complaints.
3. Connect the signals you already have
Most organizations sit on more data than they use.
Look at the indicators you already track:
- Backlogs and cycle times.
- Error rates and rework.
- Escalations and complaints.
- Employee survey comments about tools and processes.
Line those up with your “moments that matter” and your energy logs.
If all three point to the same places, you have found the friction that counts. Not generic “busywork.” Specific situations where the way work is designed is working against the people doing it and against the promises you make.
That list is your real agenda.
Change the work, not just the tone
Once you see where friction lives, the usual reflex is to communicate.
You hold a town hall. You name the problem. You ask for ideas.
That has value. It is not enough.
Your people have seen too many moments where leaders acknowledge reality and then move on. They will judge your seriousness by whether you change the work.
You do not need to fix everything. You do need to change something that matters.
Here is where to start.
Decide what you want to feel easy
In each friction hotspot, answer two questions:
- In this moment, what do we want people to be able to do with confidence and speed?
- What are we actually trying to protect or improve?
Take customer recovery as an example.
You might want frontline employees to contact the customer quickly, own the issue, and have enough authority to make a reasonable fix. You might want managers focused on patterns and learning, not micromanaging every decision.
Now look at what you have designed.
- Do policies require multiple approvals for small gestures?
- Do systems make it hard to see the full customer history?
- Do metrics punish the extra time it takes to truly resolve something?
Where the answers are yes, you have made the right behavior harder than it should be.
Your job is to remove at least one barrier in each of those moments.
Pull a real lever in each hotspot
At your level, you hold levers your team does not.
Think in four categories.
- Steps | Redesign one critical workflow from your “moments that matter” list.
- Map the actual steps as they are today.
- Remove redundant approvals.
- Clarify who owns each step.
- Standardize the information passed between steps.
The test is simple: a person inside that flow should feel next month that the path is shorter, clearer, or more predictable than it was this month.
- Scorecards | Align what you measure with what you say.
If your message is “trust and reliability,” but your scorecard screams “speed and volume,” you have designed a conflict.
Pick one hotspot. Rewrite the metric set so:
- The main measure reflects the promise (for example, durable resolution instead of call length alone).
- Guardrail measures prevent gaming without punishing the right behavior.
Then say it plainly: “This is what good looks like now.”
- Tools | Simplify the experience, even if the back end stays complicated.
- Identify the top three tasks that cause the most tool-related frustration.
- For each, define a single path and the few tools that should be used.
- Write it down. Share it. Stop blessing every workaround.
You might not own the tech roadmap, but you can decide what your team treats as the official way to get core work done.
- Rhythm | Build friction into the conversations that already run your business.
- Add one standing line to your staff agenda: “Where did the work work against our people this week?”
- When someone surfaces a real friction point, keep it on the agenda until you can point to a change.
- Close the loop with the team. “Here is what we heard. Here is what we changed. Here is what we are still working.”
This is not about “better meetings.” It is about creating a predictable place where reality can show up and lead to action.
The room already answered you
When I watched the TED audience respond, I realized something important.
I was not introducing a new problem. I was naming one they already carry.
They knew the feeling of systems that waste their effort. They knew the drag of conflicting metrics. They knew the disappointment of leaders who talk about values while asking them to tolerate conditions that undermine those values.
They nodded because they recognized themselves.
The leader who shrugged earlier in the week recognized the same reality. They just had a different reaction.
“That’s just the way it is.”
Those are two possible responses to the same truth.
One says, “Yes, this is us, and we are going to keep living with it.”
The other says, “Yes, this is us, and I am responsible for changing at least the part I control.”
You cannot fix everything. You also cannot pretend that nothing is in your hands.
If you have a team and a mandate, you have enough authority to remove some of the drag that keeps your people from doing their best work.
So treat last week’s nods and shrugs as data.
Your people already answered the question. They feel where work works against them.
Now the question comes back to you:
What is one specific friction your team lives with today that you refuse to carry forward into next week, and what lever will you pull to change it?
