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Emotions are messy. Life is full of friction. Here’s what to do about it.
You’ve felt it — the meeting that goes sideways after one wrong word, the feedback that lands wrong no matter how carefully you planned it, the relationship that keeps getting stuck in the same loop. You’ve felt it inside yourself too: the moment you react before you mean to, the pressure that makes everything harder than it should be, the Sunday evening dread that has nothing to do with the actual work.
That tension has a name. It’s friction — and most of us have never been taught what to do with it.
In Friction, leadership researchers and organizational psychologists Maggie Sass and Ross Blankenship make the case that friction isn’t random, it isn’t weakness, and it isn’t just “bad communication.” It’s a predictable force that shows up in three distinct places — inside you, between people, and in the systems and structures around you — and it’s quietly shaping everything from your own performance to your team’s culture.
Drawing on findings from their National Emotions Survey of U.S. working adults, Sass and Blankenship introduce a practical framework for understanding how emotional tension actually works at work, and what you can do to reduce the costly kind while using productive friction to sharpen thinking, deepen trust, and improve outcomes.
The heart of the book is 45 experiments, organized across all three types of friction, that you can put to work immediately. Strategies like “Breathe Before the Story,” “Set the Temperature with Your First Sentence,” “Listen for What’s at Stake,” and “Premium Strategy, Regular Fuel” give you concrete experiments to try in the moments when friction shows up and you need to respond on purpose rather than on instinct.
Friction will help you:
Spot the warning signs of escalating tension before it becomes a problem
Handle pressure without passing it on to your team
Have the hard conversations you’ve been avoiding
Build the kind of trust that makes your team resilient, not just compliant
Recognize when the system itself is creating friction, and what to do about it
Lead with more intention in conditions that feel faster and less forgiving than they used to
Friction is for anyone who has ever been caught off guard by their own reaction, or someone else’s. It’s for the newly promoted manager who’s discovering that the job is 80% emotional and no one ever told them. It’s for the seasoned leader who’s tired of advice that assumes they can be a robot or a saint. It’s for the HR partner, the executive coach, the L&D director, and the facilitator who can feel a room’s energy shift but need new language to help them navigate changing dynamics. And it’s for anyone who has ever thought: Where is the user’s manual for this mess?
Most leadership books ask you to choose: work on yourself, fix your relationships, or change your culture. Friction shows you why all three are connected by emotion and gives you the tools to work on all of them at once, backed by a companion website and downloadable worksheets.
The goal isn’t to eliminate friction. The goal is to lead through it, better.
“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
“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
“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
“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."
- Anne-Laure Le Cunff, founder of Ness Labs and author of Tiny Experiments
“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 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
Friction is the hidden force in leadership: Work keeps getting more frictionless on the surface (tools, speed, automation), while the emotional friction underneath (meaning, identity, trust, pressure, change) gets louder, and learning to work with it is a core leadership skill.
Part I: Seeing Friction Clearly
1. The Problem with Physics Why humans are emotionally seduced by “frictionlessness”, what we lose when we try to engineer it out of work, and how emotional friction becomes data (not just discomfort). Explore the three types of friction leaders face and what this book will help you do with them.
2. When and Where Do We Encounter Friction? How emotions emerge in real time, why friction is experienced at the individual, social, and systemic levels, and how it can be not only inevitable—but fruitful—when you know what you’re looking at.
3. A Field Guide to the Science of Friction A practical lens for diagnosing what’s actually happening when leadership feels hard, specifically, how friction shows up when you’re performing, wrestling with identity, searching for levers, and trying to create good friction that leads to better outcomes.
4. Leading is Managing Friction A leadership reframing: leadership as change-management in miniature, because every meaningful story (and every meaningful organization) is built on “something changed,” and friction is the felt experience of that change.
Part II: Ways to Experiment with Friction
1. Ways to Experiment with Internal Friction Tools for when the friction is happening inside you—your forecasting, meaning-making, nervous system, and identity. Strategies include:
Friction is the hidden force in leadership: Work keeps getting more frictionless on the surface (tools, speed, automation), while the emotional friction underneath (meaning, identity, trust, pressure, change) gets louder, and learning to work with it is a core leadership skill.
Part I: Seeing Friction Clearly
1. The Problem with Physics Why humans are emotionally seduced by “frictionlessness”, what we lose when we try to engineer it out of work, and how emotional friction becomes data (not just discomfort). Explore the three types of friction leaders face and what this book will help you do with them.
2. When and Where Do We Encounter Friction? How emotions emerge in real time, why friction is experienced at the individual, social, and systemic levels, and how it can be not only inevitable—but fruitful—when you know what you’re looking at.
3. A Field Guide to the Science of Friction A practical lens for diagnosing what’s actually happening when leadership feels hard, specifically, how friction shows up when you’re performing, wrestling with identity, searching for levers, and trying to create good friction that leads to better outcomes.
4. Leading is Managing Friction A leadership reframing: leadership as change-management in miniature, because every meaningful story (and every meaningful organization) is built on “something changed,” and friction is the felt experience of that change.
Part II: Ways to Experiment with Friction
1. Ways to Experiment with Internal Friction Tools for when the friction is happening inside you—your forecasting, meaning-making, nervous system, and identity. Strategies include:
- Calibrating Your Inner Forecaster
- Reframing the Job of Leadership
- Management Begins in Your Feet
2. Ways to Experiment with Interpersonal Friction Tools for when the friction is between people—stakes, defensiveness, feedback, repair, and trust. Activities include:
- Praise that Travels
- The Two-Word Reset
- Listen for What’s at Stake
3. Ways to Experiment with System Friction Tools for when the friction is structural—norms, policies, staffing math, decision rights, and the environment leaders create. Experiments include:
- The Slow Yes Rule
- Premium Strategy, Regular Fuel
- Unsent Resignation Letter
Conclusion: Friction isn’t solved once, it’s managed. The goal is to make the emotional forces in your work more visible and workable, close loops fast, repeat the maintenance, and use friction as a signal for how to lead with more clarity, capacity, and humanity.
2. Ways to Experiment with Interpersonal Friction Tools for when the friction is between people—stakes, defensiveness, feedback, repair, and trust. Activities include:
- Praise that Travels
- The Two-Word Reset
- Listen for What’s at Stake
3. Ways to Experiment with System Friction Tools for when the friction is structural—norms, policies, staffing math, decision rights, and the environment leaders create. Experiments include:
- The Slow Yes Rule
- Premium Strategy, Regular Fuel
- Unsent Resignation Letter
Conclusion: Friction isn’t solved once, it’s managed. The goal is to make the emotional forces in your work more visible and workable, close loops fast, repeat the maintenance, and use friction as a signal for how to lead with more clarity, capacity, and humanity.