By Maggie Sass, PhD
What if the friction at work isn’t a problem but a signal that tells us where the real problem is? For learning professionals, recognizing different sources of friction can lead to better diagnosis and more intentional interventions.
In my new book, coauthored with Ross Blankenship, PhD, Friction: How Tension, Emotion, and Change Reveal Better Leaders, we identify three forms of workplace friction: within individuals, between people, and within organizational systems and structures. Instead of viewing friction as something leaders should eliminate, we show how it can provide valuable information about what’s happening beneath the surface.
Internal Friction: The Weather
Internal friction is what’s happening inside a person: the dread before a hard conversation, the spiral of self-doubt, the urge to become defensive, or the story you’re telling yourself before anyone else has said a word.
This is particularly relevant to leadership development: A manager may know that curiosity matters when receiving feedback, understand the value of coaching, and be able to explain why leaders should listen rather than become defensive. Yet when an employee raises a concern, that same manager may immediately start explaining why the employee is wrong.
The problem isn’t necessarily a lack of knowledge. Something else may be getting in the way: anxiety about competence, pressure from other demands, a previous negative experience, or an assumption that criticism threatens authority.
One useful starting point is emotional granularity, which is the ability to identify feelings with greater precision rather than collapsing them into vague categories such as stressed, upset, or fine. The more precisely we can name what is happening internally, the easier it can become to understand what is driving our response.
Think of it as naming the weather. Meteorologists don’t simply say “bad weather.” They distinguish among fog, hail, wind, humidity, pressure, and temperature. We can do something similar with our internal friction.
Try This
The next time you notice yourself feeling stressed, pause and ask why. Are you irritated? Overwhelmed? Disappointed? Anxious? Embarrassed?
The word you choose may point toward what’s actually driving the reaction and what might help.
For leaders, the question can be even simpler: What emotion am I bringing to this conversation? This pause creates space between an emotional reaction and a leadership response. The goal isn’t to eliminate difficult emotions, but to recognize them earlier and make a different choice.
Interpersonal Friction: Set the Temperature
Interpersonal friction happens between people. It can appear as recurring conflict, mistrust, poor communication, a tone that lands badly, or a conversation everyone is quietly avoiding.
Imagine a leadership team that repeatedly struggles to make decisions. Its members attend workshops on collaboration and communication. They learn frameworks for productive disagreement and agree that healthy conflict is important.
Yet the pattern continues: One person pushes for debate, another becomes defensive, a third withdraws, and the group eventually reaches a less-than-optimal decision without resolving the underlying tension.
The issue may not be a lack of communication skills. The friction may reflect different assumptions about authority, conflict, or what it means to be a good colleague. This is where learning teams can go beyond teaching techniques and create opportunities for teams to examine the patterns they have developed together.
Try This
Instead of asking, “How should we communicate better?” ask, “What happens to us when communication becomes difficult?”
One practical experiment is to pay attention to the first sentence of a difficult conversation. Before giving feedback, write down the opening line you would normally use. Then ask what it signals. Does it sound like a threat or a partnership?
Try rewriting it: “I’m going to be direct, because I want us to work well together.” One sentence doesn’t solve interpersonal conflict, but it can influence the temperature of the conversation before the real work begins.
After a challenging team interaction, another useful question is: “What did you notice happening in the room?” This invites people to describe patterns before deciding who was right or wrong. Sometimes, simply naming a pattern is the first step toward changing it.
Systemic Friction: Conduct a Friction Audit
Systemic friction is embedded in the structures, routines, incentives, technology, and unwritten rules of an organization. This may be the most important form of friction for learning professionals to recognize because it can easily be mistaken for an individual performance problem.
Suppose employees repeatedly fail to complete a required process. The organization responds with training where employees learn the procedure and demonstrate their knowledge. Months later, compliance is still poor.
Before designing another course, ask what the system is telling employees to do:
- Is the process cumbersome?
- Does the technology make the desired behavior difficult?
- Are managers rewarding speed over accuracy?
- Are employees measured against goals that conflict with what the organization says it values?
Training cannot solve a problem that the surrounding system continues to reinforce. The same principle applies to change: Employees may be labeled resistant when they’re actually responding rationally to organizational history. If previous initiatives disappeared after a few months, skepticism may not be an attitude problem.
Try This
Conduct a friction audit and draw two columns: Easy and Hard.
- In Easy, list what currently requires almost no effort on your team: adding people to meetings, saying yes to requests, creating another communication channel, or starting another project.
- In Hard, list what the team genuinely values but has to fight for: protected focus time, ending an unnecessary meeting, saying no, or making space for thoughtful reflection.
Then circle two items: one from Easy that shouldn’t be so easy, and one from Hard that shouldn’t be so hard.
Ask: What’s the smallest structural change that could flip it? Maybe meetings should require a stated outcome before scheduling. Perhaps the first 90 minutes of the workday should be protected from meetings. Small changes can sometimes accomplish what another training course cannot.
From Fixing Friction to Learning From It
Seeing friction as information doesn’t mean that every source of tension should be preserved. Some friction is unnecessary or harmful. Avoid treating every difficult experience as something that needs to be fixed.
For learning professionals, friction is a diagnostic tool. A manager who repeatedly avoids feedback needs more than a feedback-skills workshop. A team locked in the same conflict may need more than a communication model. Employees who aren’t adopting a new process may need more than another training module.
So before asking, “What training do they need?” Consider asking: “What is getting in the way of the behavior we’re trying to support?”
Sometimes the answer is knowledge or skill; other times it’s a relationship. Sometimes it’s a system that makes the desired behavior difficult. Often, it’s some combination of all three.
The goal isn’t less workplace friction but a better understanding of what the friction is telling us. As we become more curious about the signals, we learn to pause before assuming the answer is another intervention. Ask where the friction is coming from, what it might be revealing, and whether the solution belongs with the individual, the relationship or the system. Those questions can transform friction from a problem to be solved into an opportunity to lead better.
Image credit: sesame
