PDF Summary:Leading at the Speed of People, by Julie Donley

In Leading at the Speed of People, Julie Donley poses a solution to various organizational failures, such as high turnover, low productivity, poor communication, and toxic workplaces: Train leaders to lead. She argues that leaders must first learn to lead themselves. Then, they must learn to identify and remove barriers to their workers’ success. Finally, they must learn to truly connect with their employees. These people-focused leaders will then be able to create an environment that unlocks and encourages employees’ full potential.

Donley is an executive leadership coach and speaker who was inspired to explore effective leadership after her own run-ins with toxic leaders, and after struggling herself to become a good leader in an organization that offered no training. In this guide, we’ll supplement Donley’s discussion with information and advice from other sources on effective leadership like Trust and Inspire by Stephen M.R. Covey.

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Donley puts special emphasis on the damage of avoidant behavior. Experts explain that avoidance tends to come from deeply ingrained fears—ones that stem from real life experiences or imagined threats. For example, you might avoid asking people for help because asking your parents for help as a child resulted in backlash, and you’re afraid to get that same treatment as an adult. So, when applying the above advice to overcoming avoidant behaviors, intentionally consider the fears, not just beliefs and unmet needs, that you hold.

When it comes to dealing with unmet emotional needs, some people find schema therapy to be more effective than CBT. Created by psychologist Jeffrey Young, schema therapy helps people explore how and why negative beliefs and behaviors formed in childhood, as opposed to negating distorted beliefs and reactions in the present. Since schema therapy involves digging into a person’s personality and their mental models of the world, not just their surface-level beliefs, it can be a longer, more in-depth process than CBT.

Manage Your External Stressors

The second aspect of managing personal stress is external: minimizing the circumstances that drain your energy. Donley advises leaders to take a concrete inventory of the burdens in their lives. Consider the issues that weigh on your mind, the obligations you keep tolerating, and the demands that drain effort without aligning with your goals. Examine your workload by identifying responsibilities you unnecessarily accepted that should be handled by others.

Donley adds that addressing external stressors requires you to set boundaries and delegate. Setting boundaries means saying no to requests that take time and energy while not contributing to your goals. To do so, take a moment to consider whether something deserves your time before saying yes.

Delegating means offloading some of your burdens to people who are better suited to complete them. Many leaders resist delegating out of guilt, distrust, or the belief that doing it themselves is faster—but failing to delegate creates bottlenecks, limits employee growth, and signals a lack of trust. Effective delegation involves matching tasks to people’s strengths, providing support, and gradually increasing autonomy as trust develops.

How to Delegate and Enforce Boundaries

In Wild Courage, Jenny Wood reiterates the importance of minimizing draining tasks and setting boundaries, explaining that the consequences of not doing so are both burning yourself out and creating your own glass ceiling. In her book, Wood offers some concrete tips that can help you successfully delegate and set boundaries.

First, she explains that one of the key ways to minimize tasks that drain your energy is not just to delegate trivial tasks, but to stop doing them entirely. For example, if you find yourself doing a task every day that doesn’t really serve a purpose, there’s no point in offloading it to someone else—just stop doing it. For the times when delegating tasks is appropriate, be clear and direct when telling other people what you want; don’t soften or minimize your statements. This will prevent misunderstandings. For example, rather than saying, “It would be really nice if you could get this task done soon,” you should say, “Can you please get this task done by the end of the day tomorrow?”

Second, Wood explains that setting boundaries means more than just saying yes or no—there are often people who won’t respect your boundaries, and enforcing them requires you to have protocols in place when these trespasses occur. For example, share your boundaries with people, and when they cross them, let them know. If people continue crossing your boundaries, simply separate yourself from these people instead of getting dramatic or aggressive.

Reducing Friction for Your Team

Once you’ve addressed your own sources of stress, Donley says you must tackle the organizational friction that affects your team. Reducing friction is a leader’s responsibility because their position grants them the power to make changes that create a tangible difference in people’s daily experience at work. The goal of reducing friction is to facilitate a healthy environment where people can thrive, one that’s characterized by clear communication, shared decision-making, recognition, opportunities for growth, mutual respect, and authenticity.

In the following sections, we’ll discuss the primary methods for reducing friction and encouraging a healthy work environment.

Are Leaders the Only Ones Responsible for Reducing Friction?

While Donley frames reducing friction as a leader’s responsibility because they have the power to make a difference, Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao take a different stance in The Friction Project. They argue that everyone in an organization—regardless of title—should act as a “friction fixer” in order to create a healthy working environment like the one Donley describes. The only difference between leaders’ and employees’ roles in friction fixing is the type of impact they can make.

Sutton and Rao explain that employees without authority can support colleagues by keeping a positive attitude and helping others navigate obstacles. Mid-level leaders can do the same as those without authority, but can additionally absorb friction from above—for instance, by translating complex directives from upper management into clear, actionable guidelines for their teams. Senior leaders, whom Donley is primarily writing for, can address systemic causes of friction, like coordination failures between departments and communication breakdowns. Sutton and Rao suggest that if you only focus on high-level leadership, you miss opportunities to encourage everyone to make your team’s work easier.

Step 1: Identify Friction Points

The first step in reducing friction is uncovering areas that create burdens and bottlenecks for your employees. Donley emphasizes that leaders often don’t know where friction lies because they haven’t looked closely enough. She recommends overcoming this by talking directly with your staff, listening carefully to complaints, reviewing employee surveys, and interviewing lower-level employees who might have a different perspective on issues and workflows.

Common friction points you might encounter include unclear expectations around roles or goals, insufficient resources or training, power imbalances that make people feel helpless, blame-oriented cultures where people hide mistakes out of fear, and unaddressed bad behavior that poisons team dynamics. (We’ll discuss targeted approaches for resolving many of these issues in Part 3.)

Why Leaders Struggle to Identify Friction

Sutton and Rao explain why leaders may not know where friction lies in The Friction Project. They identify three forces that disconnect leaders from their organization’s reality: privilege, position, and power. Their privilege shields them from the everyday struggles their employees face, their elevated position can create a false sense of expertise that discourages them from investigating friction problems further, and their power can shift their focus inward—toward their own priorities—rather than outward toward their team’s experience.

This suggests that the identification methods Donley recommends, like interviewing lower-level employees and reviewing surveys, aren’t just helpful—they’re necessary to counteract the forces that actively pull leaders away from understanding what’s really going on. Without deliberate effort to close this gap, a leader may assume their team’s experience mirrors their own, when in reality their team faces friction they simply haven’t picked up on.

Step 2: Address Problem Areas

Once you’ve identified where friction exists, Donley says that your job is to resolve it. Most issues can be resolved through a couple of targeted approaches.

First, Donley says to make sure your people have clear guidelines and resources they can rely on so there’s no guesswork. They should know where needed material can be found, what’s expected of them, and who is responsible for what. She recommends equipping employees properly, spelling out expectations plainly, and pushing appropriate authority downward so decisions can be made nearer to the work itself. When there’s a lack of clarity, resources, or structure, leaders must advocate for their team member’s needs to ensure they get what’s necessary for their success.

(Shortform note: Sutton and Rao caution that when providing guidelines and resources, be sure you don’t increase friction rather than reducing it. When leaders try to fix confusion or inefficiency, their instinct is usually to add more rules, processes, or materials. But these additions often compound the problem, burying employees under layers of procedures that make work harder rather than easier. Instead, before adding anything new, Sutton and Rao recommend subtracting: Look for what you can simplify or remove entirely. This suggests that when you find your team lacks clarity or resources, your first question shouldn’t be “What do I need to add?” but “What existing clutter is getting in the way?”)

You must also swiftly and directly address problematic behavior that violates guidelines and expectations. As previously mentioned, avoidance perpetuates issues. Once a standard is set for how people should behave and treat each other, leaders must hold themselves and everyone accountable for those agreements.

We’ll explore these concepts in more depth in Part 3.

(Shortform note: The authors of Crucial Accountability provide concrete advice for initiating a difficult conversation to address problematic behavior. The most important part is establishing mutual respect and a shared purpose—making sure the other person understands that you’re not there to attack them, but to work together toward a common goal. To do this, start by laying out the facts of the situation—what your expectations were and what they did to break them. Next, explain how the situation impacted you—for example, “This made me feel like you might not respect me.” Finally, ask for their side of the story.)

Step 3: Take Preventative Measures

Beyond removing existing friction, effective leaders proactively prevent it and add positive value. Donley recommends some ways to do so:

First, thoroughly onboard new employees. This is one of the most impactful and overlooked opportunities to avoid friction. When new employees are thrown into roles without adequate orientation, instruction, or connection to the team, they’re being set up for stress and confusion.

Second, actively improve conditions for your employees. Donley distinguishes between baseline conditions that merely prevent dissatisfaction—adequate pay, reasonable workload, basic resources—and the factors that actually motivate people: accomplishment, appreciation, purpose, and chances for development. Leaders strengthen commitment when they actively foster growth, show employees how their efforts contribute to a broader mission, publicly note strong work, and build a culture in which employees feel respected and consequential.

The Role of Onboarding in Long-Term Motivation

Donley frames onboarding primarily as a way to prevent confusion and stress, but research suggests it’s actually your first and strongest opportunity to deliver the motivating factors she describes in this section—purpose, growth, appreciation, and connection. Studies show that employees who experience structured onboarding are significantly more likely to stay long-term. One analysis found that effective onboarding improved retention by up to 82% and boosted productivity by over 70%.

What makes the difference isn’t just logistical orientation—it’s early investment in coaching, feedback, cultural integration, and helping new hires understand how their role connects to a broader mission. In other words, onboarding works best when it goes beyond preventing dissatisfaction (Donley’s baseline conditions) and actively builds the sense of accomplishment and belonging that she identifies as true motivators. Leaders who treat onboarding as merely an administrative checklist miss the window when new employees are most receptive to forming a lasting commitment to an organization.

Part 3: Foster Connection

While reducing friction allows people to work effectively, Donley argues that leaders must also foster the connections and relationships that make people want to fully invest in their work. This is where many otherwise competent leaders fall short. Connection is crucial because people need to feel recognized, understood, and valued before they’ll bring their full creativity and commitment to their roles.

Donley explains that fostering connection has four components: communicating with clarity, showing appreciation, treating people with respect, and practicing empathy. We’ll explore each component in the following sections.

(Shortform note: In Trust and Inspire, Stephen M.R. Covey similarly emphasizes the importance of connection-based leadership in bringing out people’s creativity and commitment. He adds that making the intentional switch to this leadership framework is important because the nature of modern work is largely knowledge-based—people must continuously learn, generate ideas, innovate, and collaborate to do their jobs well. Carrot-and-stick leadership actively reduces these abilities, while a connection- and trust-based approach increases them, which both Covey and Donley explain.)

Connect Through Communication

Communication is the primary way we connect with others, and it’s also one of the most common sources of workplace frustration—done poorly, it breeds misunderstandings, conflict, and underperformance. To improve communication, Donley says to focus on three primary areas: clarifying your vision, clarifying expectations, and setting boundaries.

Clarify your vision: Create a shared vision to align individual efforts so teams move together rather than in scattered directions. An essential component of this is explaining why your vision and strategy matters—this ensures people are genuinely motivated rather than merely compliant. You must also establish values that serve as guidelines for how people work together and make decisions. This provides consistency that helps people navigate difficult situations without waiting for instructions.

Clarify expectations: Specify your expectations for people’s individual contributions. Ambiguity around roles and expected outcomes is one of the most persistent sources of workplace stress. Donley recommends making all unwritten rules explicit, verifying understanding by asking people to summarize what they’ve heard, and never assuming something is obvious. When performance falls short, the first question should be whether expectations were clear. Being explicit about expectations also requires leaders to know exactly what they need—expecting employees to figure it out breeds resentment from both parties.

The Importance and Impact of Communication, Vision, and Clear Expectations

Research quantifies the stakes behind Donley’s three communication priorities. On communication broadly, 86% of leaders and workers cite ineffective communication as the leading cause of workplace failures. On shared vision, research shows that employees who find meaning in their company’s vision are almost 20% more engaged than average and are over two-thirds more likely to stay with the organization—reinforcing Donley emphasis on explaining why the vision matters, not just what it is.

When it comes to setting clear expectations, a meta-analysis spanning 60 years of workplace data found that role ambiguity—when employees are unclear about their responsibilities—was the single most damaging workplace stressor, outranking both having to balance conflicting priorities and dealing with too-heavy workloads. Together, these findings suggest that Donley’s three priorities aren’t just good habits—they target the most consequential communication failures in organizations.

Set boundaries: Define and enforce standards around acceptable behavior (for example, ensuring employees follow company values). Those standards only function if they're openly communicated and consistently upheld. When inappropriate behavior goes unaddressed, it signals that the standard is negotiable and the behavior will be repeated.

(Shortform note: In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni agrees with Donley’s point that unaddressed behavior erodes standards. However, he adds that in the healthiest teams, accountability isn’t just the leader’s responsibility—team members must hold each other to agreed-upon standards as well. When this kind of peer accountability takes root, enforcing boundaries stops feeling like top-down policing and becomes a shared commitment to the group’s success.)

Connect Through Appreciation

Donley explains that appreciation is how people gauge whether their work matters and whether they belong, and belonging is one of the pillars of connection. Without appreciation, people feel invisible, uncertain about their performance, and disconnected from the organization—all of which erode motivation. Many leaders deprioritize praise because they’re busy or believe that people shouldn’t need it, but without positive signals, people have no reliable way to know they’re on track.

(Shortform note: In The Power of Mattering, Zach Mercurio sharpens Donley’s argument by drawing a distinction between belonging and mattering. You can belong to a team—you get invited to every meeting and participate in discussions—yet still feel invisible if no one acknowledges your specific contributions. Mattering requires feeling significant to individual people, not just welcomed by a group, which is why appreciation is the mechanism that transforms belonging into mattering.)

To give appreciation effectively, be specific: Identify what someone did, the context, and the positive consequences, so they understand exactly what worked and why it was valuable. Further, make a habit of actively noticing what’s going well—when leaders consistently highlight positive contributions, others begin doing the same, shifting the team culture toward mutual encouragement.

(Shortform note: Mercurio also adds depth to Donley’s advice about being specific: Rather than simply identifying what someone did, he recommends showing the full chain of causation—what they did, what unique gifts they drew on, and what concrete effect it had. For example, instead of saying, “Great job on the presentation,” say, “The way you anticipated the client’s concerns shows your strategic thinking, and that’s why they approved the budget immediately.”)

Meaningful recognition also requires investing time in understanding your people—their strengths, goals, and lives beyond work—as appreciation feels hollow when it comes from someone who doesn’t know you. To build understanding, slow down and listen during conversations. Treat getting to know your people as part of your work rather than an interruption.

(Shortform note: On this point, Mercurio identifies four specific areas to pay attention to: What someone is naturally good at (strengths), the impact they want to make (purpose), how they see the world (perspective), and what only they can teach others (wisdom). You can identify these by watching what makes someone light up, what other colleagues ask them for help with, and what comes easily to them. This framework turns “getting to know your people” from a vague aspiration into a focused practice.)

Finally, recognition shouldn’t flow only downward. Colleagues, peers, and superiors all benefit from hearing what they contribute, and leaders who model appreciation in every direction normalize it across the team.

(Shortform note: Mercurio adds that making others feel they matter benefits you just as much as them—research shows that people who help others experience a surge of mood-enhancing neurochemicals, what scientists call a “helper’s high,” which reinforces the behavior and creates an upward cycle of mutual recognition.)

Connect Through Respect

According to Donley, respect is what makes connection possible because it fosters safety. When people are treated with dignity, they’re more willing to participate, experiment, acknowledge mistakes, and speak candidly. Without respect, people guard themselves—withholding ideas, hiding mistakes, and shrinking their contributions to avoid judgment or retaliation. When people are scared to expose themselves, they block the insights and innovation they might otherwise contribute.

(Shortform note: Donley’s point that people withhold ideas and hide mistakes when they don’t feel respected is well-documented. Research by Harvard professors Amy Edmondson and James Detert found that many employees have withheld important information from their manager at least once because they feared the consequences of speaking up. The most common reason was the fear of being negatively viewed or labeled—exactly the kind of judgment Donley warns against. This means that in most organizations, leaders are routinely making decisions without access to critical information their employees already have, simply because people don’t feel safe enough to share it.)

Donley asserts that everyone deserves respect even when their behavior is unacceptable. To treat people with respect, leaders must make a critical distinction: addressing problematic actions without diminishing the person behind them. This means approaching difficult conversations with curiosity rather than judgment—seek to understand what might be driving their behavior before correcting it. You can do this by recognizing that people’s actions often reflect internal burdens. Consider what someone's struggling with before assuming bad intent. However, don’t let this practice override responsibility: Continue to enforce expectations, but change how you hold people accountable.

Showing respect also means giving people regular, honest feedback, both good and bad. Many leaders only engage when there’s a problem, which teaches people to dread any interaction with their manager. Consistent feedback—both reinforcing what’s working and redirecting what isn’t—demonstrates that you’re paying attention and that you care about someone’s growth, not just their output. Sharing decision-making authority, as discussed earlier, is another expression of respect. It communicates that you trust people’s judgment and value their proximity to the work. Together, these practices create an environment where people feel valued for who they are, not just what they produce.

The Importance of Respect in Work and Self-Esteem

In Dare to Lead, Brené Brown explains the psychological mechanism behind why Donley’s distinction—addressing actions without diminishing the person—is so critical: Critiquing someone’s action may cause guilt, but diminishing them as a person causes shame. Brown draws a line between the two by saying guilt is the feeling that “I did something bad,” while shame is the feeling that “I am bad.” Guilt is productive—it prompts reflection and behavioral change. Shame is destructive—it triggers defensiveness, withdrawal, or aggression.

When you correct someone’s behavior in a way that makes them feel fundamentally flawed rather than simply off-track, you push them into shame, which makes improvement less likely. This is also why consistent, balanced feedback matters so much: When leaders only show up to address problems, every interaction implicitly carries the message “something is wrong with you,” reinforcing shame rather than encouraging growth.

Connect Through Empathy

Empathy—setting aside your perspective to fully understand someone else’s—creates the safety that allows people to lower their defenses, letting leaders connect with the real person rather than their outward persona. Donley explains that everyone carries self-doubt, fear, and past experiences that they protect behind a wall of composure. Until people feel that a leader genuinely cares about what they’re experiencing—not just what they’re delivering—that wall stays up, and the leader only ever gets a guarded, partial version of what that person is capable of.

According to Donley, the core barrier to empathy is when leaders are too focused on themselves. This manifests in different habits—for example, being preoccupied with your own thoughts or agenda instead of others’ needs; focusing on solving problems rather than understanding someone’s experience to help the person; or assuming you already know everything about a person just because you’re familiar with them. Getting past these habits means intentionally shifting your focus outward: Pause your internal script, resist the urge to intervene too quickly, and spend time learning what’s going on with the other person and how they’re interpreting the situation.

How to Practice Empathy

In Dare to Lead, Brené Brown breaks empathy down into five learnable skills that give structure to what Donley describes: taking others’ perspective, being nonjudgemental, understanding the other person’s feelings, being able to articulate them, and being mindful of your own emotional state.

First, Brown explains that taking the perspective of others (Donley’s first point) means not trying to see things as if you were them, but honoring that their perspective is their truth. Second, she says to withhold judgment, which is hardest when someone’s situation triggers your own insecurities. It gets especially difficult with people you’ve known for a long time, as Donley mentions, since familiarity breeds preconditioned responses.

Third and fourth, Brown emphasizes understanding the other person’s emotions and articulating that understanding back to them to verify you’re on the same page. For instance, you might say, “It sounds like you’re frustrated,” and let them correct you if your perception’s off. This will also help you ensure you’re accurately interpreting the situation, as Donley suggests. Fifth, being mindful of your own emotions ensures that they don’t take over the conversation—directly addressing Donley’s point that self-focus is the core barrier to empathy.

Brown also warns against a specific trap Donley raises: When leaders jump to problem-solving rather than sitting with someone’s experience. Brown calls this “making it better” and identifies it as a form of false empathy. It may feel helpful, but it signals that you’re more interested in resolving your own discomfort than understanding theirs.

Donley notes that the components of respect and empathy overlap in that they require you to focus on others’ experiences to understand and appropriately address their behavior. However, practicing empathy takes this a step deeper: It requires you to be vulnerable with others early on so that they feel safe enough to be honest with you before difficult moments arise. If you stay guarded, others will mirror that guardedness. But when you lower your defenses first, it gives others permission to do the same—and that mutual openness is what turns a professional relationship into a genuine connection.

(Shortform note: Neuroscience research explains why Donley’s advice to lower your defenses first actually works. The brain contains mirror neurons—cells that fire both when you perform an action and when you observe someone else performing it. These help you detect and unconsciously replicate the emotional states of people around you. Research on leadership behavior has found that these mirror neurons make both trust and distrust contagious: When a leader is guarded or distrustful, others subconsciously mirror that guardedness back, but when a leader expresses genuine openness, it triggers feelings of safety in others.)