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Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Leadership Growth Podcast. I'm your host, Daniel Stewart, along with my wonderful brother, Peter Stewart.

And we have not only a fantastic guest, but a fantastic kind of counterintuitive topic: 0:26

How friction can actually benefit our relationships. We'll let that sink in. We have a fantastic guest here to talk about it. Ross Blankenship, welcome to the Leadership Growth Podcast.-Thank you, Daniel. Thanks for having me on.-Let me just kind of share a little bit, a brief background for Ross, and then we're going to dive into this kind of interesting topic here. So, Ross Blankenship, organizational psychologist, executive coach, and author, who works with CEOs and senior leadership teams on the human side of leadership. He is the author of Everyday Leadership and Assessing CEOs and Senior Leaders, and is currently co-authoring a new book. This will be a great one. A new book called Friction, which actually, yes, is the topic here today, coming out August 2026, which explores how the emotional tensions of modern work can actually become the raw material for better leadership. So, Ross, you're out in Alabama, I believe, right?-I am. Birmingham. Born and raised.-Oh, fantastic. Yeah, you live with your wife and two daughters. And then you run a coaching and advisory practice called Tuesday Advisors. And also you do a fair amount of writing essays on work, identity, and psychology on your Substack so people can then look and check you out@rossblankenship for your Substack. So anyway, tremendous to have you here.

Let's start off with this question: 2:05

friction and relationships. How did you get to that? How did you dive in to then looking at, hey, friction, that actually might be helpful for relationships. Where did that come from for you?-It's a good question. It's, um... I don't think of it specifically as friction in relationships, although that is definitely a piece of it. It is like broader and deeper than that. But I arrived at this idea in thinking about AI and how AI is impacting how we think and how we learn. And I've, you know, read a fair bit about how computer systems are designed, or how user interfaces are designed, and a lot of the ways that our technology is designed these days is to reduce friction, to eliminate it almost entirely. Think about how easily you can order food to your door. You know, rather than what we would think of as like the behavioral friction of having to call somebody or drive somewhere and pick it up, you can push a button and have it delivered. And you can look at that same dynamic across any number of technological applications from dating to communication to you name it. And then when these AI systems started coming out and we started seeing initial research about what it does to brain activity and learning, we started to think about like this is the same frictionlessness drive or dynamic that we're after, but it's being applied in a way that's actually eliminating the value. So there are fascinating streams of research in like there's one called Desirable Difficulties. It's about how if you make the way that you study a little bit harder, it actually boosts retention and it boosts recall. So you can learn things better by making it actually more uncomfortable in the way that you study. And so that line of thinking became kind of a model

for my co-author Maggie Sass and me to think about: 4:09

are there ways of thinking about friction, like internal friction, which we think of as emotion, then interpersonal friction, which is like conflict or relational dynamics, and then system friction, which is culture. You know, the ways that we design our systems that make it easier or harder to get things done. And so this became kind of like a metaphor for how do we relate to when things are hard or when we perceive them to be hard in life. And when we should be trying to make them easier versus when we should say, like, maybe this is a chance to go a bit slower for a better outcome later.-So as I'm hearing that, Ross, it sounds like this concept of friction is not necessarily something that we fundamentally want to get rid of. There's actually some benefit at understanding it at certain layers. How can listeners, as they're hearing this notion, like how can they use that concept? Can you share some examples of where friction might initially we want to avoid, but in the end, it turns out to be helpful?-Yes. Yeah. The example that always comes to mind for me is there was kind of a moment where this idea crystallized in the context of emotional intelligence, and how emotion is kind of like the substrate of what makes effective leadership behavior. So like it is the thing that is underlying all of the skills and dynamics that we think about it as related to leadership. It's emotion, because leadership is inherently interpersonal. And so you're always dealing with other people if you're leading. And people are emotional, you know, even when we're rational, like there's emotion involved in rational thinking. And so I was doing work with an executive team talking about delegation. Peter, you may have heard this in my conference presentation. And we were talking about barriers to delegating. And, you know, there's a number of things that anybody could reel off about how much do I trust the person I'm delegating to? How much do I believe they can deliver at the same level of quality? There's timing issues, training, you know, any of these technical elements. But one person said, “I don't delegate because I'm selfish.” And I'd not heard that before. And so, and I'm a psychologist, so I said, “Tell me more.”(laughing) And we got into this conversation about identity and this feeling that I don't delegate because there are things that I do at work that make me feel valuable. And if I give them away, then I'm losing something about my identity. And I had this moment of like, well, that's grief. Like, you're talking about bereavement, you know, like you're talking about the absence of a thing that's important that is special to you. And if that is standing in the way of you delegating, that's a really different problem than like knowing how to delegate, how to set expectations. And then it occurred to me too that the other things here that prevent this from happening, it's not that I don't know that I need to have a conversation to hold somebody accountable. It's that it makes me uncomfortable to think about it. And it might make me uncomfortable for reasons that are different than it makes you uncomfortable. But in both cases, it's the emotion that is making it challenging. And if you go straight at the emotion, you're doing something really different than going at like the skill.-You're reminding me, one of the rules of engagement I'll often do at the beginning of any like leadership off site or something, or even workshop, is I will talk about and challenge them and say,“I hope at some point you feel uncomfortable, while we're together.” And I'll say, not uncomfortable because it's an awkward moment, or you know, the room isn't arranged right, or some whatever. No, it's because you've looked deep inside, and you had the oh crap moment, the realization where you may need to challenge your own biases, challenge the way you've done something and unlearn, and you feel a little uncomfortable. And so how you're describing friction, it's almost like stress. Because sometimes we can look at stress and say, “I want to get rid of all stress.” And yet, we know that there's that magic point. And for those of you who are just listening, I'm kind of drawing that bell curve idea where you want enough stress to push you and motivate you and learn. And yet, if you get too much stress, that's where the burnout or the discouragement.(laughing) And so to find that... that special space around where just enough friction is helpful. So Ross, have we gone overboard in all of the beautiful simplicity of design that we're focused on? Are we getting rid of too much friction sometimes?-Yeah.(laughing) I think so. It's interesting. I had a client recently ask me what I thought was going to, you know... We're in this moment with AI where everybody's kind of prognosticating about there's either the accelerationist view that AI is going to eliminate jobs, like all jobs, and we're not going to have to work anymore, which I don't think is a... properly accounts for human nature. And then there's the view of like, well, it's going to, you know, whipsaw out and then swing back, and things are not going to change that much, and maybe it'll be in some of our systems. I actually think the friction idea is a useful way to think about this because... I love... it's Dunning-Kruger, I think. The effect of like you need a certain amount of stress in order to be engaged and too much and you shut down or fight or flight or freeze or... any of those fun reactions. At the individual level, I think there's an amount of uh using these technological systems that's really useful. It makes um boring, monotonous, repetitive tasks um... almost eliminates them. Interpersonally, you know, it has interesting uses, and there's research about AI and coaching, or like chatbots and coaching and therapy, that it actually does provide a useful benefit. And even systemically, like it can make again complex systems more easy to manage at scale. But I think if you think about in any of those levels, taking too much friction out, if you take too much of the friction out of my thinking through something that I'm writing, then I'm not really thinking about it anymore. Part of the benefit of writing it is thinking about it, it's sort of like learning what you think as you try to create it. And there is a struggle involved in that. Interpersonally, if you offload all of the way that you communicate with other people onto a system, you're no longer thinking about how am I saying this? It's really not even a person talking to another person. And then at the systemic level, I think if you inject too much AI into it, if you pull too much of the friction out, we're not going to know how our systems work anymore. Like, I think about this in my car a lot. Um, I recently sold a car and bought a stick shift again, which is what I drove when I was 16. And I uh... Things kept breaking in my car, and I was like, I am not a computer programmer, and so I can't work on my car. And like, it's not like I'm going to work on my car really anyway. But now I'm in a car that's like a machine, and I know it's a machine, and I experience that every day on the way to school with my kids because I'm shifting gears. It drives differently when it's cold. You know, there's like an element of like, I am in a real thing that I really appreciate. But it's definitely a system that has a lot more friction than getting into a Rivian that could basically drive my kids to school without me, probably.-Mm hmm.-I feel like we run the risk of if you abstract that idea out to society, it's like we're going to have people who don't know how to think through what they think, who don't know how to interact in uncomfortable ways, and who are trying to then solve problems in systems that have so much of the understandable mechanisms pulled out of them that you're kind of left to like look at it and wonder, like, I don't know what the AI is doing in there. I don't know how this machine works because it's a computer on wheels. It's not a car.-It's fascinating as you're sharing this because it's that notion of how, you know, just at a fundamental level, friction builds strength and muscle. I mean, as we look physiologically, that's how we build those in our bodies. And I know you're not just kind of spouting these as your opinions. And I mean, they're fascinating opinions, but you've also been doing research on this for a long time. And I know you and Maggie have been running this research study, you know, the American Emotion Survey, for a while.-Yeah.-What are some additional elements from there that you've gleaned that really help apply to the modern workplace, and leaders?-Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Our emotion survey has been really fascinating. It's um... I think our work here started, I guess a lot of research projects start this way, it started as kind of we're observing this in the field, we should learn what does this look like at scale? And so we gathered a survey of responses of representatives of the American population. And a couple of things I think are noteworthy. The very first thing we were curious about is how much do people even know about or think about EQ? And we found that about 30% of respondents knew what EQ was or thought about it at all. So there's A, there's a lot of work to do out there about helping people learn more about the emotional inner workings of their minds and their bodies. 70% of the people we surveyed said that they believed that emotional intelligence is going to matter even more in the future, which I think was kind of a reinforcing idea for us for us that as these systems become smarter, as work changes in the realm of AI the human to human interaction is going to become even more important, especially in a leadership capacity. Fascinatingly, too, so... Take that idea. 70% of people think that emotions are going to become more important, or emotional intelligence is going to matter even more. And then just over a third, 35% of people agree that emotions are a weakness at work. So that's a really interesting problem.

You know, we started to try to identify: 14:32

can we show in data, can we find like some patterns here that show that leadership is emotional work. We don't think about leadership as work that has like an emotional cost. And we found, I would say we found that kind of in spades. You know, we found that almost half of workers said they feel drained from managing their emotions at work. And there's this interesting kind of cross effect, too, of... people who identify as more emotionally intelligent experience more strain. So if you're in a system where you experience high friction, which we would call like a system where emotion is viewed as a weakness and you are very emotionally aware, then you're experiencing even more tension to manage yourself in that environment. And then, of course, we find generational differences. You know, it's kind of a classic generational ladder where the younger generations are less likely to view emotion as a weakness. Older generations are more likely to view it as a weakness. And so there's kind of a almost a sociological effect here, too. You know, we talk about the silver tsunami of retiring boomers. There's like an emotional effect of that that we're measuring in the workplace as well.-Let's keep going with this idea. And a moment ago, you —or a few minutes ago— you were mentioning how we can look at this kind of friction at the individual level, team level, and organizational level.-Mm hmm.-Talk to us a little bit more in terms of how those three different lenses, how does that inform how we want to go about building relationships in each of these kind of levels of analysis or scoping, if you will.-Yeah, sure. The you know, I was just working on a portion of the book writing about emotional granularity, which is this idea from Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made, where she talks about, the way that I remembered it, which I was just looking, and this is not what she says, but that emotional granularity, like the diction that you have about your emotion, is foundational to emotional intelligence. Now, she would say it's like it's a lever that you have. And I'm like, no, it's like the thing. Which is to say, like the more words that you have, the finer, you know, like the thinner you can slice the way that you're understanding your emotion, the more emotionally intelligent you are. And I love that idea at the individual level because it's a pretty simple thing to do. It's literally just learn more words. Go to like, Google a feelings wheel or the mood meter. And that is a way to become more emotionally intelligent, just to observe what you're feeling and try to get more specific about the word that you use. You know, men are notorious in my work for saying they feel frustrated. And almost always what I think they're saying based on my observation and kind of experience of them is you're angry. But nobody says that. And even that is an important distinction if you think about the difference in the magnitude and like the pattern of when irritation might become frustration, might become anger, might become rage. Those are really important distinctions, but we don't use words with that fine a grain, especially at work, because words like rage become really uncomfortable. And I can guarantee you rage exists at work.(laughing) So that is at the individual level. At the interpersonal level, I think it's even more important to think about... when is an emotion that I'm experiencing or one that I'm anticipating changing how I'm acting with somebody? So if I'm expecting somebody to be disappointed or frustrated, or, you know, any other number of emotions, I'm probably going to pull back, or I may avoid that conversation. And that's something that we see in coaching and in teamwork all the time. One of the questions I ask most of leaders is, have you said that out loud to them? And the answer is almost always no. You know, we're having a conversation talking about incredibly detailed dynamic about how they behave on a team, and none of it has been said out loud. And this is why people get fired, and it's a surprise, which that should never be the case. You know, we should be talking about our performance as we go. We should be learning and getting feedback and either getting the chance to improve or not. At the system level, it's a much more complicated thing. There's a great book that I would recommend called The End of Burnout, by Jonathan Malesic, and it's more of a sociological, anthropological look at burnout, but the thing that he harps on ultimately is how systemic burnout is. You know, we, especially psychologists, are kind of predisposed to think of burnout as an individual problem with individual solutions, and it really is not and does not have individual solutions because... It's almost like our organizations, especially in the West, especially in America, are designed to extract as much out of people as they can get. And so, you know, trying to like take a personal day will not solve systemic burnout. And it's interesting. This is something we found in our research, too, which is more emotional intelligence can serve as a buffer in a high friction environment, but it doesn't solve the friction problem. It's really more of a design problem. And so that's when you get into questions about incentives, you know, work design, like things that a leader might have control over, somebody in authority may have control over, but you really need to understand the impact of them and how they trickle down in the culture in order to take effect on it.-Oh, these are powerful illustrations at the different levels, Ross. And as you're describing it, I'm... particularly at that individual level of kind of building somebody's feelings vocabulary, I'm taken back to the my clinical days where oftentimes that was step one of therapy is expand the feelings vocabulary, so we can do it. And and some of the premise behind that goes back to the the Whorfian hypothesis. I think it was Karl Whorf was his first name, who projected that or postulated, if we don't have a word for something, we really can't ever fully see it.-Mmm.-And how language is just key to our understanding of the environment around us. And so much of what you're illustrating at that individual, team, systemic level is expanding the framework, the models, the vocabulary we're using, so we can actually see where are there breaking breakdown problems within this system.-Totally.-So I just I love the way you're bringing that up at a burnout perspective. So let's back up for a minute because I know you have not always been an EQ believer.-Right.-What led you to actually... Because I know there's listeners here who are like, oh, we hear about EQ all the time. Does it really make a difference? What's this based on? As an EQ convert, so to speak, what brought you to this point? This is an ongoing joke with between Maggie and me, which is, I keep saying, can we write a book about emotional intelligence and leadership without using either of those words on the cover?(laughing) Because the same thing, I see that word and I kind of like bucket it into like a whole host of thoughts and feelings. I'm like, I'm not interested in that. I feel a little bit the same with leadership. I'm like, I'm interested in like the impact that people who are doing leadership, who are like practicing leadership can have on other people. But as a field, I find leadership, it's one of those words that kind of doesn't mean anything to me anymore. And... The way that I came into this, so I came in through executive assessment, a consulting psychology background, which is the overlap between org psych and counseling, basically. And did executive assessments and succession planning, and was doing a lot in the kind of M&A, talent assessment, and hiring space, and got the opportunity to write my first book, Assessing CEOs and Senior Leaders, which is about executive assessment. It was sort of like the book that I would have wanted to read when I was getting into the field if it had been available at the time. And it was also kind of my take on Dean Stamoulis' book, Executive Assessment, Senior Executive Assessment. Which is also a great resource. And I put my proposal together and I sent it to the American Psychological Association. I got some feedback back that said, you're covering a lot of good ground here, but you haven't said anything about emotional intelligence. And I wrote a letter back and I was like, I know, I've done the research and I don't think it adds incremental validity over X, Y, and Z that we already use in executive assessments. And at the very senior level, like the data sets aren't big enough. And, you know, I kind of went on a grad school screed about it. And the person who wound up having provided that feedback is Maggie, who is my co-author in this book.(laughing) She was a blind reviewer of my proposal. And in the intervening years, I've done more and more coaching. So I went and kind of shifted from assessment to assessment for development leadership development to just... A lot of what I do now is one-on-one coaching or kind of working with individuals and teams. And so much of what I do, if not all of it, is framing and emotion management with people. And usually the emotion management is framing, which is helping people think... differently. I would say more clearly, but I'm not quite sure that's true.

It's sort of like: 24:30

how do you shift the perspective to gain new insight, to gain kind of new feelings or perceptions of what you're doing or how you relate to it. So much of it is so bound up in your emotional awareness and your emotional experience of your work. And even in that regard, like in your body, like your experience of your body and how you take care of like the animal, like the soft body of yourself. I love that Mary Oliver term. Then it kind of became undeniable.

And so I shifted maybe all the way over: 25:10

like, how do we measure it and what does it mean to measure it to like, well, we know it's the most important thing. The measurement of it is maybe secondary. But let's come up with new ways to think about it that may give people, especially skeptics like myself, access to it in a way that feels... Like it may enable performance or it may enable effectiveness, not just like emotional intelligence for the sake of being like kind or demure or something like that. Like I'm interested in the emotional intelligence of like Olympic athletes who are negotiating with each stroke of their crew boat at the absolute limit of their ability. But I would say, like in that moment, that is emotional intelligence pushing you to elite performance, not, like, not in the sake of... for the sake of being less direct or being less effective, but almost like for that purpose.-Let's take this to the day-to-day aspect of this as we think of applying some of these ideas, leveraging friction to build effective working relationships with others. And I'll say the word leadership, for lack of a better term. But it's what can leaders take that they can do every day with this information? What does that look like, especially... Especially as the demands of leaders, especially the middles, that middle management space, increases all the time with technology, with AI, with so many demands. What are the nuggets? What can we take to help everyday leaders build and strengthen their ability to lead?-There are a couple of things that I always go back to. One is continuing to talk to people. And I say that specifically, like talk to people. We are really quick, I think, to send emails, especially, I mean, I do this. I write emails really fast and then I drop it into Claude and I say, like, make this read like a human wrote it. You know, and it's like an email that I've written, but it's then been edited. And we've known for years how much tone and context digital communication strips out of a message. And I think that especially in a leadership position or in a position where you are having some amount of authority over other people, it is easy to over-index on how quick and simple digital communication is compared to talking to people. An example that we saw of this recently in an interview for our book was about letting people go. It was interesting. We saw two different, these are different clients. Two different experiences of a layoff.

And one of them was like: 28:00

you've been invited to a Zoom 15 minutes from now, with no context, and you log on, and then you're laid off, and the CEO is not even on the screen. And it's like maybe a tech problem, and then you're just done. And of course everybody feels jilted and bad. And, you know, it's kind of an inhumane way of handling like a very human challenge. Another client, you know, say what you will about how they did this, but they had individual conversations with like 300 people, to tell them about their package, why they were doing it. And it wasn't, it was all performance related. It really wasn't like we have to do a layoff. It's like we are doing this in order to try to get lean and move faster. And everybody, you know, nobody's happy to get laid off, but I think they probably processed it a lot more clearly, and cleanly. And that is ratcheting up the friction in a systemic decision dramatically, in order to handle like a challenging circumstance in a more humane way. I think like thinking about the human level of the work that we're doing in organizations is always the call, whether that's having a conversation in person, being able to meet in person, or taking the time to just be present with somebody else. You know, that's a conversation I have a lot with leaders as well, which is... sort of taking the time to be with the team and hear what they have going on, what they're kind of processing, so that you can then serve as like a support to that, rather than just focusing constantly on how do we accomplish the goal that we have set out in front of us today. And this is, again, all in service of like becoming more effective over time. Sometimes you have to slow down in the moment in order to to kind of be able to move more quickly together later.-Yeah, very, very helpful perspectives. And I think that sage advice of communicate, talk, interact, I think it's going to become just so critical more and more. And as you're saying that, I'm reminded of a recent coaching conversation I was having with a very driven leader, who we've been working on building EQ with them. And a key distinction that this individual has begun to adopt was helping to pay attention when they're having a conversation with somebody. Historically, he'd been so focused on making sure they agreed with him.(laughing) And so he was focusing on any signs of disagreement, as opposed to actually paying attention to signs of disengagement.-Mmm.-And that little distinction just has paid dividends so well because now he's got a lens through which he's looking at this interaction where he's not afraid of friction.(laughing) He's creating, he's happy to create the friction. But he's now tuning into, oh, wait a minute, is their silence actually a sign not of agreement, but of disengagement?-Right.-And so it's like all of these little applications we have and the nuances of these interactions where there's not a one size fits all. But we have to be aware and try and put ourselves in those situations where we're going to be having those interactions.-Mm hmm. My favorite... My favorite book at the moment, I hate that I can't remember her name. There's a book called Improv Wisdom from the professor of improv out at Stanford for years and years. But the subtitle is Don't Prepare, Just Show Up. And I love that because it's almost a corrective against the like, I have to have all the answers. I'm the leader. I need to know. And in many circumstances, that's not true. And in circumstances where I'm working with somebody who believes that if you go unprepared, you're still going to be prepared compared to average. But I like the, it's almost like go and do improv with somebody in a conversation rather than going to deliver a message or make sure to confirm that they think X about what you're saying. Just go see. I love encouraging people to, in conversations, to say, can you listen in a posture? Can you go in with a posture to listen to somebody else?

And the posture is this: 32:47

I am willing to leave with my mind changed. Like, I'm willing to let go of what I think and listen in such a way. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will. I find that idea uncomfortable in a lot of circumstances. And I've had clients who say, like, I don't know what you're talking about. You know, like, I'm an attorney and that's not what I'm going to do. I have a perspective. But I think there is an interesting kind of mental... check there of like, how can I go in with an open hand rather than a clinched fist in the way that I'm approaching this person or kind of interacting with them? That can be useful.-Here's the final question for you. What's the one thing? What's the one thing that a leader can take away to be able to then leverage friction to build relationships effectively? What would be that one thing?-Yeah, I wouldn't even go so far as how to leverage friction to build relationships or lead more effectively. I would say just find some friction in your life and reflect on it. Like, just start there. And usually it's, there's a, you know, a conversation I've not had, a person I'm not talking to, a decision that I haven't made. Find a sticking point, something that is kind of persistent or in the back of your mind, and just reflect on what's going on there. You know, it might be as simple as back to the idea of emotional granularity. Try to apply a more specific word than frustration or avoidance, you know, and dig into it a bit and see what's going on. Because I think the more specific you can get in a circumstance like that, the better able you are, I think, to then take action on it in a useful way, to get started. The other, you know, as I think as part of that, then, another way that we talk about that is like lowering the bar to start. So finding like the very simplest, smallest version of a task or something that counts as starting. The classic example in my mind from atomic habits is like if you... If you decide that doing a push-up a day counts as you having worked out that day, then you can work out every day. And that's the kind of habit that can start to change your identity over time and then can lead to, you know, more lengthier and complex exercises, but like start there. Like what is the smallest way that you can start to think about there's some friction over here that I should just reflect on and maybe put some more energy into thinking about.-I love it. Start small, start with something. Just start. Ross, thank you so much for being part of the Leadership Growth Podcast.-Yeah, it's a treat. Thanks for having me, guys.-Absolutely. And thank you to all of our listeners for joining us. And we hope that the ideas and tools that we've talked about today will help you elevate your leadership experience and performance. Join us again. Subscribe and like, and we welcome you to a future episode. Take care, everyone. Bye. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. Or, better yet, leave a review to help other listeners find our show. And remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. For more great content or to learn more about how Stewart Leadership can help you grow your ability to lead effectively, please visit stewartleadership.com.