“Great leaders see themselves as trustees of other people’s time.”
That is Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Stanford Graduate School of Business, speaking on the school’s If/Then podcast.
Many of us may not have come across the entire role of leadership captured more succinctly than that.
The most valuable thing a leader can give people is not perks or money.
It is a purpose worthy of their time.
Your top employees have options. If you are paying the market rate, they could move across the street and earn much the same. What they cannot so easily replace is a sense of purpose they genuinely believe in.
Rao’s definition is the other side of that coin. It is not just that the mission must be worth their time. It is that everything you ask of them along the way — every meeting, every process, every form — must also earn its place.
A trustee does not waste what has been entrusted to them.
That distinction emerged in a large-scale study of meeting behaviour across eleven organisations.
Researchers who analysed anonymised data from forty million meetings found that virtual meeting loads continued to rise even after return-to-office mandates. They also found that more than half of all meetings were led by just 10% of employees.
Rao is co-author of The Friction Project, and “friction” is his term for anything that slows work down — a meeting, an approval chain, a policy.
On the podcast, he likens friction to cholesterol. Some is harmful, some is essential.
Bad friction confuses, overwhelms, or exhausts people without reason. Good friction makes you pause and think before acting.
Skiers and skaters need friction to turn. Organisations need a version of that too.
So what should leaders make easier? Rao argues for two things: curiosity and generosity. Remove whatever obstructs people from asking questions and helping one another.
What should leaders make harder? Overconfidence and myopia. Introduce enough friction that people slow down and reflect before committing, rather than charging ahead on autopilot.
He cites an old maxim attributed to Augustus Caesar, said to have been given to his generals before battle: festina lente— “make haste slowly”. Move fast without thinking, and the formation collapses.
The same applies to a leadership team rushing into a decision no one has properly considered.
The failure mode, Rao says, is “addition bias”. Leaders keep adding processes, approvals, and meetings with the best of intentions, and no one ever goes back to remove them.
He recounts Dropbox after its IPO, when the CEO identified meetings as the firm’s single biggest problem — what he called “OurMeetinggeddon”.
The CEO issued new guidelines. A few weeks later, the problem was worse. His conclusion: reducing friction is not a one-off task. It is like mowing the lawn. You must keep at it, or the weeds return.
Rao also explains why meetings are so difficult to eliminate even when everyone agrees they are a problem. It comes down to incentives.
Attendees fear missing out, particularly with so many working remotely or in hybrid roles.
Organisers, meanwhile, treat a packed meeting as a status symbol: look how many people’s time I can command. Neither side is keen to reduce the guest list.
The best summary may be what one workshop participant told Rao about working in a company that never subtracted anything: “I work in a frustration factory.”
No one wants to be the leader who built one.
Which brings us back to the original definition.
A landlord charges you for a room and cares little for how you spend the time there. A trustee is accountable for what is placed in their care.
Time is what your best people place in your care, every single day. The question isn’t whether you are keeping them busy.
It is whether you are spending what they have entrusted to you as though it belongs to someone else.