Friction
How Tension, Emotion, and Change Reveal Better Leaders
By Ross Blankenship, PhD & Maggie Sass, PhD
Stop eliminating friction.
That's where great leaders are made.
We’ve been taught to treat friction as a problem, something to smooth over, work around, or eliminate entirely. But what if the tension, conflict, and discomfort you face at work aren’t obstacles to great leadership? What if they’re the source of it?
Friction makes a counterintuitive case: the difficult moments in leadership — the hard conversations, the emotional tension, the ambiguity and constant change — hold the information leaders instinctively avoid, and the key to their most powerful results.
Drawing on new research and decades of experience coaching executives, Ross Blankenship and Maggie Sass reveal how emotional intelligence doesn’t fail us when things get hard, it’s what allows us to lead through it.
This book is a practical field guide to turning friction into fuel with tools and strategies for leaders who are ready to turn their hardest moments into their biggest edge.
01
The Science of Friction
Why emotional data in hard moments is the most valuable signal leaders routinely ignore.
02
A Framework for Leading Through It
Internal, interpersonal, and systemic friction, and how to work with each one.
03
Practical Tools That Work
Hacks, habits, and hard things — structured experiments you can start using today.
The Authors
Maggie Sass, Ph.D.
Maggie Sass serves as an executive at TalentSmartEQ, where she specializes in applying evidence-based approaches to leadership development, talent strategy, and culture transformation. With a background in psychometrics, assessment design, and emotional intelligence, her work focuses on translating leadership theory into practical, measurable behavior change at scale.
Ross Blankenship, Ph.D.
Ross Blankenship is an executive coach and advisor who works closely with CEOs and senior leadership teams through his firm, Tuesday Advisors. He is the author of Everyday Leadership and Assessing CEOs and Senior Leaders, and writes extensively on leadership and organizational change. His work centers on helping leaders navigate the human complexities of leadership in real-world environments.
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