The hidden benefit of friction

Sometimes the discomfort we’re trying to eliminate is exactly what leaders need to pay attention to.

By Dr Maggie Sass, organisational psychologist and co-author of Friction: How Tension, Emotion, and Change Reveal Better Leaders

I’ve spent more than 17 years watching leaders try to make difficult conversations more comfortable. Someone pushes back on a decision. A team member raises a concern. Almost immediately, someone jumps in to smooth things over. The instinct is understandable. Friction can be exhausting, and some of it is genuinely unnecessary. But I’ve become increasingly interested in the friction leaders shouldn’t be so quick to remove. Sometimes the tension in a room isn’t a problem to solve. It’s the first sign that something important is finally being said.

Not all friction is the same

Leadership is usually measured in revenue, margin and turnover. In most performance reviews for senior leaders, there may be a section for people and culture, but it usually follows the financial and project updates. What gets less attention is what is going on emotionally while the business of work gets done. Fear can shape a decision, trust can determine whether someone speaks up, and fatigue can change how a team responds to pressure. Whether leaders acknowledge them or not, these dynamics are all part of the work.

Some friction is clearly unhelpful. Examples include an approval process that slows everyone down or a meeting that exists because it’s always been held first thing on Monday mornings.

Interpersonal friction is different. Disagreement can feel uncomfortable, as can pushback from someone who sees a risk we have missed. A team wrestling with competing views may look less efficient from the outside, but the disagreement may be doing important work. The question is not whether there is friction; it is what the friction is telling us.

The room where it happens

You can often see the effects before anything is even said in a meeting. People become more careful about how they phrase a question, a disagreement gets softened, or someone who was ready to speak decides to wait. The meeting moves ahead, but the conversation has changed.

I’ve seen the opposite, too. A leader walks into a difficult meeting under pressure but acknowledges that the room feels tense and asks what people are worried about first. Someone starts talking, another person adds something, and a concern that might have stayed buried finally makes its way into the discussion. Now the team has something real to work with.

What leaders do with discomfort

This is where our usual approach to workplace friction can get us into trouble. We’ve spent years helping companies remove unnecessary obstacles, and that work matters when a bad process or unclear expectation is getting in people’s way. But applying the same instinct to every difficult interaction can mean smoothing over information we actually need.

A leader who becomes unusually quiet during a difficult conversation is sending a message, even if they don’t plan to. The same is true when a leader changes the subject when things get personal. People notice these shifts, and over time they learn what happens when they speak up.

That is why emotional intelligence is not simply about staying calm. It is about recognising what is happening inside yourself and what is happening in others, and having enough flexibility to decide what to do next. A leader who notices defensiveness can pause before responding, ask a question rather than immediately pushing back, or acknowledge that a conversation has become uncomfortable without trying to shut it down. Those choices can change what happens next.

The research behind friction

Ross Blankenship and I spent a year and a half researching exactly this for our book, Friction. In our 2025 National Emotions Study of nearly 1,200 US workers, 56% told us they believe leaders feel more pressure to hide their emotions than anyone else in the company. More than half also said that when leaders hide what they’re feeling, it creates more problems than it solves. The finding suggests that suppressing emotion doesn’t necessarily make its impact disappear. People notice shifts in a leader’s behaviour, even when they don’t know exactly what’s behind it.

Ask what the friction tells you

The source of the tension matters. Sometimes a leader is wrestling with doubt about a decision or anxiety about what comes next. Sometimes two people are looking at the same situation and reaching different conclusions. And sometimes the organisation has created the problem through a process or expectation that simply does not make sense.

A question to ask may be, “What is this friction telling us?” A team that keeps resisting a new process may have a concern that has not been addressed. A manager who avoids a particular employee may be uncomfortable with conflict. A project that keeps getting stuck may have a problem with how decisions are made. Instead of treating the tension as the problem, we can use it as a place to start looking.

Culture determines what happens next

That work cannot be delegated entirely to employee training. Individual emotional intelligence skills have limits when the surrounding culture sends the opposite message. If people are rewarded for staying quiet or learn that challenging leadership comes with consequences, a training session won’t be enough to change the underlying dynamic.

Leaders have to look at their own behaviour and at what the organisation reinforces. When someone brings difficult information and the leader stays curious rather than defensive, the employee has a reason to speak up again. When disagreement is routinely dismissed or shut down, people learn that too. Over time, a lack of disagreement can look like alignment even when it is really just silence.

Don’t be so quick to fix the discomfort

The most valuable moments in leadership are not always the easiest ones. Someone may question the plan, point out a risk or see a problem that others have overlooked. So when a conversation becomes uncomfortable, the instinct does not always have to be to make everyone feel better. Sometimes the more useful response is to stay curious longer, ask one more question and give people enough room to say what they were actually thinking. This may not make the meeting smoother, but it may make the conversation more honest. And sometimes that is what the organisation needs most.