The underrated thing about being easy to work with

It has almost nothing to do with being agreeable.

I’ve been thinking about the people who steadily progress at work, and there’s a quality nearly all of them share that gets very little attention.

They’re easy to work with.

I know how soft that sounds written down. It also has almost nothing to do with being friendly, which is why the phrase gets dismissed by exactly the people who’d benefit from understanding it.

What people hear, and what’s really meant

When people hear “easy to work with”, they usually picture someone agreeable. Somebody who doesn’t push back, doesn’t hold positions, goes along with whatever’s decided.

If you care about doing good work, that description should make you uneasy, because you’ve watched agreeable people get walked over and you’ve watched their projects suffer for it. So the phrase gets filed under things said by people who don’t care about quality, and the actual idea gets thrown out with it.

What I mean is low friction.

When somebody needs an update, you’ve already sent it. You hit a problem and you raise it early, while it’s still small and cheap. You’re stressed about something and you’re containing it rather than distributing it around the team.

You don’t generate extra work for the people near you. They know what to expect from you, which means they can plan around you, which means their own cognitive load drops slightly every time you’re on their project. And when everyone is already underwater, that makes you someone people actively want.

Somebody who delivers solid work without chaos is worth more to a team than a brilliant person who leaves everyone tense. You can have the genius who’s always late, never communicates, and makes each meeting marginally worse. And you can have someone good who’s reliable and clear. Leadership picks the second one repeatedly, and it isn’t because they can’t tell who’s smarter. It’s that one of them costs the team energy every week, and energy is the scarcest thing in any organisation.

Why this is worth more now than it used to be

I think the value of this has gone up, and it’s connected to something broader.

As more of the executional work gets automated, a larger proportion of what’s left is coordination. Deciding what to build, aligning people who see different parts of the picture, making judgment calls with incomplete information. That work is almost entirely relational, and relational work is enormously sensitive to friction.

A brilliant individual contributor who’s difficult was always a trade-off, and the trade-off used to favour them more often, because raw output was scarcer. As output becomes cheaper, the calculation shifts. What remains expensive is the human capacity to hold a project together, and that capacity is degraded by exactly one person being unpredictable.

The hard part

Knowing when to stop being low friction.

Sometimes there’s a real problem and you need to raise it even though raising it makes things awkward and slow. If you’re staying quiet to keep the surface smooth, that’s avoidance wearing the costume of low friction, and it produces a much larger mess later that you’ll also have to be in.

The distinction I use is whether the friction is in the work or in the relationship. Friction in the work is often necessary. Disagreeing about the approach, flagging a risk nobody wants flagged, refusing to commit to a date you don’t believe in. Friction in the relationship is almost never necessary. Being hard to reach, letting people find out late, making your stress everyone’s ambient condition.

Being low friction means you don’t create unnecessary problems. It doesn’t mean you don’t hold positions. If anything you can push harder on things that matter, precisely because you’re not spending anyone’s patience on things that don’t.

Worth checking

Look at where you might be adding friction without registering it.

Are you sitting on bad news until you have a solution attached? Are people having to chase you for updates? Is there something you’ve been deliberately vague about, because being specific would commit you to something?

And if you’re already the person people can count on, the one who doesn’t add to everyone’s stress, you’re probably worth more to that team than you think.