Why Friction Isn't the Problem

Every leader I've worked with has, at some point, treated friction as a problem to be solved. The tense meeting. The colleague you've started avoiding. The initiative that keeps stalling no matter how many times it gets relaunched. The instinct is to smooth it over, push through it, or wait for it to pass. But friction isn't a malfunction; it's information. And learning to read it, rather than trying to eliminate it, might be the single most underused leadership skill in most organizations today.

In my work with companies and teams navigating change, I’ve seen firsthand how friction emerges when new expectations, technologies, and ways of working reshape people’s roles. Much of my work as an organizational psychologist has focused on emotional intelligence and helping leaders understand how emotions, relationships, and trust shape the way people respond when the ground beneath them is shifting. I explore this pattern with my co-author, Ross Blankenship, PhD, in our upcoming book, Friction: How Tension, Emotion, and Change Reveal Better Leaders. The book examines what emotions can tell us about what is happening beneath the surface when work becomes difficult. That perspective has reinforced something I see repeatedly in organizations: friction is rarely just about the thing people are arguing about. It’s information that needs to be understood.

My co-author Ross Blankenship and I start with this premise: leadership only exists where there are other people. You can be brilliant and visionary entirely on your own, but until your own thinking intersects with other human beings, you're not leading. You're just thinking.

That makes leadership a social phenomenon, and social phenomena run on emotion. Every decision and conversation lands in someone's nervous system before it ever lands in a spreadsheet. Strategy and technical skills matter, of course, but your ability to turn plans into coordinated action with other people rises and falls on how well you work with emotion: yours, theirs, and the emotion generated by the systems you're all operating inside.

Once you accept that leadership runs on emotion, friction stops looking like an obstacle and starts looking like a signal. The knot in your stomach before a hard conversation, the resistance you can feel from a team even though no one has said anything explicitly, the meeting that somehow always runs long and accomplishes little. These aren't distractions from the real work. They're telling you something about where attention is needed and what kind of response the moment is asking for.

Ignoring that information doesn't make a leader more objective; it just pushes the reaction underground, where it turns into stubbornness, avoidance, or listening only to people who already agree. The room notices anyway, and people start protecting the leader from discomfort instead of protecting the work from risk. The alternative is to treat tension as diagnostic and ask what it's pointing to before deciding what to do about it.

In our research and coaching work, we found that friction tends to show up in one of three places, and each calls for a different response.

Most leadership advice treats these three as interchangeable. They're not. A leader who responds to systemic friction with a personal coping technique, or responds to interpersonal friction by white-knuckling through their own discomfort, is applying the wrong tool to the wrong problem. Naming which kind of friction you're actually in is most of the battle.

The good news is that none of this requires a personality overhaul. It requires a willingness to experiment, especially when uncertainty and pressure are high and your instinct is to default to what you've always done. That might mean naming your own defensiveness out loud instead of letting it run the conversation. It might mean slowing the pace in a heated meeting and asking what people are actually worried will happen. It might mean redesigning a recurring meeting that has quietly become a symptom of unclear decision rights rather than a forum for making decisions.

Small, deliberate experiments like these are how leaders build the kind of intentionality that holds up under pressure. Not because the friction goes away, but because it stops catching them off guard.

None of this asks leaders to become more emotional. It asks them to become more literate in emotion, their own and everyone else's, so they can read what's actually happening instead of reacting to it. Friction will keep showing up. It always does, in any group of people trying to do meaningful work together. The question is whether leaders treat it as noise to be silenced or as the clearest signal of where their attention belongs.

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