How Tension, Emotion and Change Reveal Better Leaders
45 strategies for navigating the tension that shapes your leadership, your relationships, and your results.
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Endorsements
“We all run into friction—doubts, challenges, and conflict—from time to time. This book shows how friction can be a gift for leaders—a way to bring out the best in themselves and others. If you want to grow as a leader, this is a great place to start.”
Ken Blanchard
Coauthor of The One Minute Manager and The Simple Truths of Leadership
“Insightful, grounded, and deeply practical — Friction gives leaders a new playbook for turning emotional tension into a strategic advantage.”
Dr. Jean Greaves
Author of the bestseller Emotional Intelligence 2.0
“This is not a book about avoiding hard moments; it’s a book about using them. Friction reframes the emotional reality of leadership as something to work with, not manage around, and offers tools that hold up in the moments that actually test you. The shift is simple and consequential: from reacting on instinct to responding with intention.”
Frances Frei
Harvard Business School Professor
“Friction invites leaders to approach discomfort with curiosity and experimentation, revealing how the parts of work we most want to smooth over can become the very places where growth begins. A deeply useful guide to turning moments of tension into opportunities for discovery.”
“This lively and readable book will change the way you think about the inevitable clashes and disappointments that are a part of life, as well as the emotions that go with them, which will help you both as a person and a leader.”
James E. Ryan
President Emeritus and Professor, University of Virginia
“Ross and Maggie provide a simple, yet powerful framework for understanding what friction is in our lives and at work, how to respond to fiction in ways that productively moves us and those around us forward, and, most importantly, they layout a process to continuously learn through experimentation. If you are a new leader, one who has recently been promoted, or a seasoned executive, this book should be on your reading list.”
Mark Blankenship
Chief of Staff & Strategy (retired), Jack-in-the-Box
“Friction is in your future. Your near future. This book will help you make the most of it, for your sake and for others’.”
Michael Bungay Stanier
author of The Coaching Habit
“I build simulations that help leaders practice difficult conversations, partly because I’ve spent fifteen years learning how easy they are to avoid. Friction is the book I wish I’d had earlier.”
Founder & CEO, Virbela
“Friction makes a counterintuitive case: the emotional resistance we feel inside ourselves, between people, and inside our systems isn’t noise to eliminate, it’s a signal worth reading. Drawing on neuroscience, decades of executive coaching, and an original survey of 1,100+ working adults, Drs. Ross Blankenship and Maggie Sass pair a sharp conceptual framework with 45 practical experiments “Hacks,” “Habits,” and “Hard Things” for working with friction rather than fleeing it. It’s the rare business book that respects how messy the job actually is.”
Founder & CEO, Unstoppable Solutions
“Friction is one of those rare books that gives language to what leaders are actually experiencing every day. The friction within ourselves, in our relationships, and in the systems around us. ‘Leadership is an emotional act; not occasionally, not in the difficult conversations or the high-stakes moments, all of it.’ That idea is so on point! Research-based, practical, and deeply relevant, this book offers tools and insights that apply not just at work, but in every relationship in our lives.”
Founder & CEO, Catalyst Development
The goal isn't to eliminate friction. The goal is to lead through it, better.
Every leader feels it — the moment you react before you mean to, the conversation that keeps going sideways, the team that’s talented but stuck. That tension has a name, and most of us have never been taught what to do with it.
In Friction, organizational psychologists Maggie Sass, PhD and Ross Blankenship, PhD make the case that friction isn’t random, isn’t weakness, and isn’t just “bad communication.” It’s a predictable force that shows up in three places — inside you, between people, and in the systems and structures around you — and it’s shaping everything from your relationships to your team’s performance.
Drawing on their National Emotions Survey of U.S. working adults, Sass and Blankenship offer 45 practical experiments organized as Hacks, Habits, and Hard Things across all three types of friction — concrete strategies to build stronger trust, have better conversations, create more alignment, and sustain performance when things get hard.
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About the Authors
Maggie Sass, Ph.D.
is an organizational psychologist, executive coach, and the EVP of Content, Research, and Professional Services at TalentSmartEQ. A former Senior Faculty member at the Center for Creative Leadership, she is the coauthor of Better Conversations Every Day and a contributor to the ATD Leadership Handbook. She holds a PhD in consulting psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology and a B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives with her family in San Diego, CA.
Ross Blankenship, Ph.D.
is an organizational psychologist and executive coach. He is the founder of the leadership coaching and consulting firm Tuesday Advisors, and author of the books Everyday Leadership: A Guide to Developing Your Mindset as a Leader and Assessing CEOs and Senior Leaders. On Substack, he writes Theory of Change, a newsletter where he explores how people make sense of their lives through work, identity, and moments of transition. He holds a PhD in consulting psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology and a B.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Virginia. He lives with his family in Birmingham, AL.
Interested in having Maggie and Ross speak at your next corporate event?
Leading Through Friction™
The book is the starting point.
For organizations ready to go deeper, Leading Through Friction™ is a leadership development program built on the research and practical strategies behind the book. Designed to help leaders navigate the three types of friction that show up in every organization — internal, interpersonal, and systemic — and especially relevant for organizations navigating AI adoption and digital transformation.
Wear the work. Friction-branded journals, tees, hats, and more.
Podcasts
Are You Removing the Wrong Friction?, with Maggie Sass and Ross Blankenship
The One Thing AI Can’t Fix for Leaders, with Drs. Ross Blankenship & Maggie Sass
FRICTION: How Tension, Emotion, and Change Reveal Better Leaders | with Dr. Maggie Sass and Dr. Ross Blankenship
Corrections to the first printing are listed on the Errata page and will be incorporated into the second print run.