Liza handles customer concerns for a service company. She knows the work, cares about the customers, and usually sees the solution quickly.
One afternoon, a customer calls about a billing error. Liza confirms that the company made the mistake and knows that a refund will solve the problem. But refunds above a certain amount require her supervisor’s approval, and the supervisor is in back-to-back meetings.
The customer waits.
Liza sends a message to her supervisor, follows up thirty minutes later, and apologizes to the customer for the delay. By the time the approval arrives, the customer has already called again.
The following Monday, the team reviews customer response time. Their manager is frustrated.
“We need more urgency,” he says. “Customers should not have to chase us.”
Liza agrees.
She wanted to solve the problem the first time.
Urgency was never missing.
The work would not let urgency become action.
This is another reason to be careful before calling something a motivation problem. People can understand the result, care about it, know what to do, and still struggle to perform because approvals, information, handoffs, tools, workload, routines, or other parts of the working system keep getting in the way.
Sometimes people do not need to push harder.
The work needs to stop pushing back.
Good People Can Look Slow Inside a Slow System
When performance disappoints us, it is natural to look first at the person.
Why did she take so long?
Why didn’t he follow through?
Why isn’t the team showing urgency?
Sometimes those are exactly the questions we should ask. But they become dangerous when we ask them without looking at what the person has to move through.
Consider Liza again. Her manager sees the final result: a customer waited too long. From that result, it would be easy to conclude that Liza needs to become faster or more customer-focused.
But follow the work.
She identified the problem quickly. She knew the appropriate response. She wanted to act. The delay appeared between her decision and the authority required to carry it out.
Telling Liza to move faster does not shorten that distance.
This is why the working system matters. People act inside approval rules, information flows, handoffs, tools, meeting schedules, incentives, measures, workloads, and manager routines. These conditions can make the desired behavior easier to perform—or repeatedly pull people back toward the old one.
A motivated employee inside a badly designed process can eventually look unmotivated.
Listen for the Sentence That Gives the System Away
Managers often hear clues without recognizing them as clues.
“I’m still waiting for approval.”
“They haven’t sent us the numbers.”
“I can’t close this until Finance confirms it.”
“The system won’t let me change that.”
“I finished our part. It’s with the other department now.”
“We need three signatures before we can proceed.”
One of these statements does not prove that the system is the problem. People can use processes as excuses too.
But when the same delay appears repeatedly around the same moment, it deserves investigation.
Suppose a company wants supervisors to resolve employee concerns faster. The supervisors attend training, learn how to handle conversations, practise several situations, and return to work ready to use what they learned.
Then an actual issue appears.
The supervisor listens, gathers the facts, and sees a reasonable solution. But the policy requires HR approval. HR needs documentation from Payroll. Payroll processes requests only twice a week.
The supervisor can communicate beautifully and still leave the employee waiting.
Training improved the person.
It did not improve the path the work has to travel.
This is why Execution Is the Daily Practice of Strategy matters. Execution does not happen inside people alone. Strategy enters real work through decisions, conversations, approvals, handoffs, routines, and systems. If those conditions reward the old behavior, people may struggle to sustain the new one no matter how strongly leaders encourage it.
Run the Friction Check Before You Add More Pressure
When capable people repeatedly struggle to produce a result, resist the instinct to immediately push for more effort.
Run a Friction Check.
Start with the exact moment where movement stops.
For Liza, the useful observation is not “Customer service lacks urgency.” It is more specific: “When a refund exceeds the approval limit, the customer waits until a supervisor becomes available.”
That gives us something we can investigate.
Next, ask what the person needs in order to move. Does the work require a decision, information, permission, another person’s action, access to a tool, or enough uninterrupted time?
Then follow that requirement until you find the friction.
Perhaps the approval level is unnecessarily low. Maybe the information exists but is stored in another system. Two departments may be measured against competing priorities. A manager may have become the approval point for work that could responsibly be decided closer to the customer.
Finally, remove or reduce one blocker before asking people to compensate with more effort.
The play is simple:
Locate where the work stops. Identify what the person is waiting for. Find what creates the wait. Remove one unnecessary source of friction.
Then run the work again.
Do Not Make People Work Around Problems You Could Remove
Organizations often become proud of employees who “go the extra mile.”
Sometimes that deserves recognition.
A person stays late to rescue an important customer. A supervisor personally carries documents across departments because an urgent transaction cannot wait. A team invents a temporary spreadsheet because the official system does not provide the information they need.
Those actions can be admirable.
But if the same extra mile is required every week, it may no longer be evidence of commitment.
It may be evidence of bad design.
Imagine that Liza begins keeping her supervisor’s meeting calendar open on another screen. When a refund request arrives, she watches for a gap and sends a message at exactly the right time so she can get approval faster.
She becomes excellent at working around the bottleneck.
Her manager may even praise her resourcefulness.
But the organization should still ask whether Liza ought to need that workaround at all.
There is a difference between helping people become more capable and requiring capable people to overcome avoidable friction forever.
Strategic Learning treats the system around behavior as part of the work because a new response survives only when the environment allows it to survive. If leaders want faster decisions, they may need different decision rights. If they want cleaner handoffs, teams may need shared information. If they want supervisors to coach more often, they may need to examine what currently consumes the supervisor’s day.
The solution is not always to remove something. Some controls exist for good reasons.
The important question is whether the condition is protecting something that matters—or simply preserving the way the work has always been done.
Make the Desired Behavior Easier to Perform
Suppose Liza’s manager examines several weeks of customer cases and notices a pattern.
Most refunds requiring supervisor approval are routine. Very few are rejected. The approval protects against financial risk, but the current threshold sends many low-risk decisions upward.
The team changes the boundary.
Liza can now authorize refunds up to a higher amount when the company clearly caused the error. Unusual cases still require consultation, and the team reviews exceptions during a short weekly checkback.
Another customer calls with a billing problem.
Liza confirms the error, explains the resolution, processes the refund, and tells the customer when to expect it.
No speech about urgency was required.
The company changed one condition that had made urgency difficult to express.
This is what it means to design with the system around the person. We should still expect people to exercise judgment, learn skills, and take responsibility. But we should not ask behavior to carry a result that authority, information, tools, measures, or routines repeatedly prevent.
Sometimes the most useful leadership move is not adding another behavior.
It is removing what makes the desired behavior unnecessarily hard.
Watch the Work, Not Just the Mood
How do you know whether friction really was part of the problem?
Watch what happens after you change the condition.
In Liza’s team, customer issues requiring routine refunds may close faster. Repeat calls may decline. Fewer cases may wait for supervisor approval. The supervisor may spend less time approving ordinary transactions and more time reviewing unusual ones where judgment genuinely adds value.
Those are more useful forms of evidence than asking whether the team now feels more motivated.
This is the same logic behind From Daily Behavior to Visible Impact. A change becomes meaningful when we can follow what it changes in the work. Faster ownership, fewer handoff delays, less rework, cleaner decisions, and shorter escalations can provide early proof that the new arrangement is helping.
And evidence can surprise us.
Perhaps we raise the approval limit and customer response time does not improve. Now we know the approval rule was not the main blockage. We might discover that representatives spend too much time searching for customer history, or that another department still controls a critical part of the process.
Good diagnosis does not require us to defend the first solution.
It asks us to keep following where the work actually stops.
If the Work Is Fighting Them, Training Should Not Pretend Otherwise
This distinction matters when organizations ask for training.
A client may say, “Our supervisors need to become more accountable,” or “Our employees need a stronger sense of urgency.”
Perhaps they do.
But before designing the program, we should understand what is happening in the recurring moments where accountability or urgency disappears.
If people do not know what to do, learning may have a clear job. If they know but lack practice, training and coaching can help. But if people already know what to do and a three-step approval process prevents them from doing it, another workshop will not remove the three steps.
That is why our approach to leadership training in the Philippines begins with the work that needs to move. Training should earn its place by solving a capability or practice problem. When the stronger blockage is authority, information, workflow, manager behavior, or another working condition, that needs to become visible too.
Sometimes the workshop is part of the answer.
Sometimes the most valuable discovery happens before the workshop is designed.
Before You Blame Motivation, Follow the Friction
This article is part of Motivation at Work: Before You Blame the People, Diagnose the Work.
When people can see what matters and have meaningful ownership but the result still moves slowly, get closer to the work before asking them for more energy.
Where does the work stop?
What are they waiting for?
Which approval, handoff, tool, piece of information, routine, measure, or manager response keeps appearing around the delay?
And which of those conditions is genuinely necessary?
Run the Friction Check on one recurring situation. Remove one avoidable blocker. Then watch what happens the next time the work reaches that point.
If movement improves, you learned something important.
The people may never have needed more motivation.
They needed the work to let them move.