If you’ve ever walked out of a meeting with the sense that something important went unsaid, you already know what friction feels like. A little tension between colleagues is completely normal, and it often means people care about the work and want to get it right. The trouble comes when that tension goes unaddressed and hardens into patterns that affect individuals, teams, and whole organizations. That’s when ignoring it gets costly. When my co-author Ross Blankenship and I wrote Friction, we wanted to challenge people to think of that tension as information worth listening to.
Ignored or absorbed friction rarely shows up as one big, loud problem. Instead, it leaks into everyday work in quieter ways: the things people stop saying, calendars that keep filling up with meetings where no decisions get made, and the teammate who seems more tired than their workload explains. The good news is that these patterns are easy to spot once you know what to look for, and just as easy to start changing.
Here are five signs that friction has moved from normal to costly, followed by a few small things to try.
First, Separate Useful Friction from Wasteful Friction
Not every bit of friction deserves fixing. The real work of leadership is correctly diagnosing it to know the difference between friction that wastes people’s time and friction that helps them grow. Productive friction surfaces broken processes, unspoken fears, and assumptions nobody has said out loud. Wasteful friction looks like redundant approvals and confusing workflows. The signs below describe what happens when useful signals get ignored long enough to start costing results.
- Your Team Goes Quiet
Silence is usually the earliest signal, and it’s easy to mistake for agreement. Amy Edmondson’s well-known 1999 study connected psychological safety, the shared belief that it’s safe to take interpersonal risks, to how much teams learn. When people worry about embarrassment or punishment, they tend to hold back, and silence is expensive from a revenue perspective, and a talent one.
Keep an eye out for fewer questions, fewer objections, and bad news that only appears once it has already become urgent.
- Decisions Don’t Stick
If the real conversation keeps happening in the “meeting after the meeting,” then the first meeting probably didn’t settle much. In Friction we describe how calendars fill up with meetings that exist only because decisions don’t travel cleanly, a kind of “coordination debt” that everyone can feel and doesn’t always get tracked like other KPIs.
The way work is structured matters here, too. A 2022 MIT Sloan Management Review study, found that companies adopting no-meeting days cut total meetings by 40% and saw gains in autonomy, communication, engagement, and productivity.
- The Same Conflict Keeps Coming Back
When a disagreement returns again and again, it’s often because the rupture was never truly repaired. Drawing on attachment research, when repair doesn’t happen, people protect themselves by withholding, complying, avoiding, or counterattacking. From the outside, none of those looks like conflict. They look like a team that is “fine.”
Curiosity is frequently the missing ingredient. A 2018 Harvard Business Review survey of more than 3,000 employees found that only 24% feel curious at work on a regular basis, and 70% say they face barriers to asking more questions.
- Energy Drains Faster Than Workload Explains
Christina Maslach’s research describes burnout through three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism, and a reduced sense of efficacy. Her work also makes an important point for leaders, which is that the causes sit in the mismatch between people and their environments, not in individual weakness.
Our National Emotions Study of 1,188 U.S. adults found that nearly 30% of workers regularly feel drained from managing their emotions at work. A large meta-analysis links “surface acting,” which means faking an emotion you don’t feel, to worse well-being and more exhaustion. When people spend their energy managing how they come across, they arguably have less left for the work itself.
- Your Team Manages You Instead of the Work
Ross tells the story of a CEO who believed his intensity was modeling urgency. His executives saw anxiety instead, and they adapted by holding issues back until they were 90% solved. Whether we mean to or not, leaders set the emotional weather.
The data points in the same direction. In our survey, 56% of respondents agreed that leaders feel more pressure than others to hide their emotions, and 53.6% said hiding them creates more problems than it solves. Gallup estimates that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement scores across business units. And a Center for Creative Leadership study of 6,731 managers in 38 countries found that managers seen as empathetic by their direct reports also received higher performance ratings from their own bosses.
Five Small Things to Experiment with This Week
Each friction sign has a matching experiment so you can start testing today.
- If your team goes quiet: Change how you open the conversation. Write your opening sentence first the way you normally would, then name what it might signal to the other person, such as threat, shame, or lack of specificity. Rewrite it with an opener that signals care, like “I’m going to be really specific, because I want you to have the impact you’re capable of.” Afterward, notice whether the message landed faster and whether trust went up, down, or stayed the same.
- If decisions don’t stick: Start your next recurring meeting by naming the decision you need to make, and end it by confirming the decision, owner, and date in writing. Then check a week later whether it held.
- If conflict keeps recurring: Try the 48-hour curiosity tally. After every conversation, mark Yes or No: Did I learn something new about this person, not the project? After 48 hours, look at your ratio and what made the Yes conversations different. You may find that recurring conflict is partly a story you’ve been running about someone, not a conversation with them.
- If energy is draining: Rate your team from 1 to 10 on exhaustion, cynicism, and efficacy, and repeat it monthly. Treat the trend as operating data: notice where the strain clusters, whether in a particular meeting, role, or type of work, and use it to change one condition of work, such as workload, control, or recognition.
- If your team is managing you: “People wait until a problem is mostly solved before they bring it to you.” That’s the kind of thing you might hear if you ask a trusted colleague what your team does differently when you’re stressed, so ask and listen without defending. Then, when bad news arrives, count your breaths before you respond, so you’re reacting to what happened rather than the story your stress is feeding you.
None of this requires a reorganization or a new tool. Each step starts with noticing, which is where friction stops dragging on performance and starts being useful.
If two or three of these sound familiar, pick the one that costs your team the most and run its experiment for a week. Our book Friction: How Emotions, Tension, and Change Reveal Better Leaders is out now wherever books are sold and includes these plus 40 other experiments to help you explore your relationship with friction, improve your leadership, and maximize performance.
References
Edmondson on psychological safety and holding back. Edmondson, Amy C. “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999.
MIT Sloan on meeting-free days. Laker, Benjamin, Vijay Pereira, Pawan Budhwar, and Ashish Malik. “The Surprising Impact of Meeting-Free Days.” MIT Sloan Management Review 63, no. 2 (January 18, 2022). https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-surprising-impact-of-meeting-free-days/.
Attunement, misattunement, and repair. Eubanks, Catherine F., Lisa Wallner Samstag, and J. Christopher Muran, eds. Rupture and Repair in Psychotherapy: A Critical Process for Change. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2022.
HBR curiosity survey. Gino, Francesca. “The Business Case for Curiosity.” Harvard Business Review, September–October 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-business-case-for-curiosity.
Maslach’s three dimensions of burnout. Maslach, Christina, Wilmar B. Schaufeli, and Michael P. Leiter. “Job Burnout.” Annual Review of Psychology 52, no. 1 (2001): 397–422. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.397.
Surface acting meta-analysis. Hülsheger, Ute R., and Anna F. Schewe. “On the Costs and Benefits of Emotional Labor: A Meta-Analysis of Three Decades of Research.” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology16, no. 3 (2011): 361–389. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022876. (Chapter 7, note 18)
National Emotions Study (the 1,188 respondents, the nearly 30% drained, and the 56% and 53.6% findings). Sass, Maggie, and Ross Blankenship. National Emotions Study: Emotional Intelligence and Workplace Emotion Among U.S. Adults. Proprietary survey data. San Diego: TalentSmartEQ, 2025.
Gallup’s 70% estimate: Gallup. “Why Great Managers Are So Rare.” Gallup Workplace. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/231593/why-great-managers-rare.aspx.
Center for Creative Leadership empathy study (6,731 managers, 38 countries): Gentry, William A., et al. “Empathy in the Workplace: A Tool for Effective Leadership.” Center for Creative Leadership white paper, 2007.