658R: How to Help Change Happen Faster, with Frances Frei
Coaching for Leaders
Dave Stachowiak
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Frances Frei: Move Fast & Fix Things
Frances Frei is a professor at Harvard Business School. Her research investigates how leaders create the context for organizations and individuals to thrive by designing for excellence in strategy, operations, and culture. She regularly works with companies embarking on large-scale change and organizational transformation, including embracing diversity and inclusion as a lever for improved performance. In 2017, Frances served as Uber’s first senior vice president of leadership and strategy to help the company navigate its very public crisis in leadership and culture.
Her partner Anne Morriss and her are the authors of Uncommon Service and The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. They are also hosts of Fixable, a leadership advice podcast from the TED Audio Collective, and they are recognized by Thinkers50 as among the world’s most influential business thinkers. Their newest book is Move Fast & Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems.
A lot of us assume that going fast is reckless. There are certainly times when that’s the case, but it’s also true that leaders going too slow at the wrong time can make things worse. In this conversation, Frances and I discuss how to do a better job of moving quickly when it’s time to address the toughest problems.
Key Points
- Many of us believe that going fast is reckless and going slow is righteous. While there are times that is true, there are many examples where it’s not.
- The fastest way to speed up your company is to empower more people to make more decisions.
- Dare to be bad at something. Deciding what not to address allows you to go faster at what you’re best at.
- Two key elements of completing work are work-in-progress and cycle time. Most leaders address cycle time first and miss the more substantial work-in-progress opportunities.
- Create a way to fast-track projects that become important and build this into the culture of the organization.
Resources Mentioned
- Move Fast & Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss
Interview Notes
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Dave here from Coaching for Leaders. I am taking a very brief pause until January 5th on airing new episodes here on the podcast, but I am not leaving you hanging in the meantime because there is so much inside our library that I keep coming back to daily. Many of our members are continually surfacing back to me, and many of you are telling me regularly that |
| 0:21.7 | the episodes I recommend at the end of every new episode are helpful to you in new ways. |
| 0:27.1 | And I'm bringing back a conversation to you today and also another one next week that will |
| 0:31.9 | help you start 2026 well. The first one you're about to hear is with Francis Fry. |
| 0:37.8 | Francis is the author, along with her partner, Ann Morris, of Move Fast and Fix Things. |
| 0:43.6 | They were both recently recognized by Thinkers 50 as two of the top management thinkers in the world. |
| 0:48.6 | The reason I'm re-airing this episode is because I'm hearing from lots of leaders in our community on the |
| 0:55.9 | increasing challenge and disruption of adapting to change and culture shifts. And because this |
| 1:03.6 | conversation challenges one of those assumptions we often make, that going fast is reckless |
| 1:09.8 | and going slow is righteous. Not necessarily, |
| 1:14.4 | as you'll hear in this conversation. For leaders who need to make change happen faster, |
| 1:19.2 | this one's for you. This is a rebroadcast of Coaching for Leaders, episode 658. |
| 1:25.9 | Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. |
| 1:34.2 | Greetings to you from Orange County, California. |
| 1:37.6 | This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stahofiak. |
| 1:42.3 | Leaders are born. |
| 1:44.8 | They're made. |
| 1:50.7 | And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. |
| 1:57.7 | Of course, one of the things that leaders are charged with is thinking about change, the importance of change. |
| 2:02.3 | And we've all heard really good advice on organizational change. And one of those pieces of advice is to slow down, take your time, be deliberate. There's a time and a place for |
| 2:08.4 | that, right? But there's also a time and a place for urgency and how quickly we move. And those aren't |
| 2:14.9 | either ors, but they're often both and and thinking about |
... |
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