Friction : How Tension, Emotion, and Change Reveal Better Leaders

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 te