Leaders don’t mean to waste their employees’ time. Unfortunately, many of them heap unnecessary work on the people below them in the pecking order—and are downright clueless that they’re doing it.

They give orders without realizing how much work those directives entail. They make offhand comments and don’t consider that their employees may interpret them as commands. And they solicit opinions without realizing that people will bend over backward to tell them what they want to hear—rather than the whole truth, warts and all.

That is what my Stanford colleague Huggy Rao and I have learned from our “organizational friction” project. We’re studying why some organizations make the right things too difficult to do and the wrong things too easy to do—and what leaders can do to avoid such missteps.

The roots of waste

Before describing how to avoid it, it’s important to understand why so many leaders are blind to the ways they waste employees’ time.

First, many bosses don’t pay enough attention to followers’ behaviors, needs and troubles.