Most leaders have been taught to treat friction as the enemy. We redesign processes to eliminate bottlenecks, smooth handoffs, and reduce resistance. We celebrate the org chart with the fewest approval steps and the org culture with the fewest meetings. We invest in software that promises to remove friction entirely, and we measure our own effectiveness by how smoothly things run.
In many ways, this instinct is right. Nobody misses redundant approvals, confusing workflows, or meetings that exist only because they always have. Operational friction can waste time, energy, and resources that could go toward driving real results.
But AI has taken this instinct and scaled it dramatically. Every organization is now racing to figure out how AI might change their operations, their industry, and perhaps their future. And baked into nearly all of that conversation is a single assumption: less friction equals more output.
It’s not a new idea, but it’s a more persuasive version of an old one. If we can smooth the process, we can skip the discomfort. Even Claude’s own advertising leans into this directly, less friction equals more ability to produce results.
That’s a reasonable principle for software, it’s a dangerous one for leadership. And somewhere along the way, we started applying it to our relationships instead of just our systems. We began treating emotion at work as something to manage away, tension as proof that something had gone wrong, and change as a risk to control rather than a reality to lead through. We confused harmony with health, and ease with effectiveness.
Here’s the irony. The moments that actually define leadership are almost never frictionless.
A leader working through anxiety before a high-stakes presentation. A colleague pushing back hard on a strategic decision. A team wrestling with competing priorities that have no obvious resolution. A direct report who finally says the thing everyone’s been thinking. None of these are interruptions to leadership, they are where the real work of leadership lives. They’re the moments where emotional information can help shape judgment, where trust gets tested, and where real development and growth is possible. Remove them, and you won’t make your teams stronger, you’ll make them quieter and more brittle.
Great leaders don’t measure their success by how little friction exists around them, they ask a different question: what is this friction actually trying to tell us? Sometimes it’s revealing a broken process that genuinely needs fixing. Sometimes it’s exposing a fear nobody’s said out loud. Sometimes it’s surfacing a strategic assumption no one realized they were making. And sometimes it’s simply reminding you that progress often requires people to move through discomfort.
Friction exists in our organizations. The real task of leadership is not to reduce it, it’s to learn how to tell the difference between the friction that wastes people’s time and that which grows them. That distinction, and the practical skill of building it into how you lead, is what our new book Friction, is all about.