The silence after her words could slice through steel. Maya had just told the leadership team what no one dared say out loud: “The product isn’t just behind schedule. It is broken.” A year of progress, gone. Most leaders might panic, pivot, or placate. But CEO Anya Osakwe didn’t flinch. She leaned in, eyes locked, and said, “That’s not a problem; that’s clarity. Let’s do what’s right, not what is easy.” What followed wasn’t chaos. It was combustion, the productive kind. Tensions rose, egos buckled, but breakthroughs emerged. They didn’t innovate despite the conflict. They innovated because of it. In a world obsessed with harmony, the leaders who drive real progress are the ones willing to strike the match and then stay in the room when it burns.
“These aren’t cultures of chaos; they are meticulously designed ecosystems where friction is the fuel for excellence.”
Conflict isn’t the enemy of great leadership; avoidance is. While many leaders are conditioned to smooth edges and keep the peace, true leadership recognises that beneath disagreement often lies untapped insight. The best leaders don’t neutralise tension; they refine it. Like heat strengthens steel, friction, when skilfully harnessed, sharpens teams, reveals blind spots, and fuels transformation. This isn’t about being combative; it is about being courageous enough to hold space for hard truths, differing views, and necessary disruption. If harmony is your highest aim, growth will always be sacrificed on its altar. But if progress is your mission, friction must become your tool.
Research from the Kellogg School of Management found that teams with moderate, well-managed conflict outperform those that operate in artificial harmony by 35 percent. Why? Because when people are empowered to disagree respectfully, they push each other to think deeper, see wider, and decide wiser.
At Pixar, director Brad Bird was asked to lead a group known as “the black sheep, the misfits, or the challengers. They offered candid, often brutal feedback. The result? The Incredibles, a blockbuster that grossed over $600 million and redefined animated storytelling. Bird didn’t avoid friction; he curated it. He invited dissent because he believed in the creative friction of disagreement.
Contrast that with Kodak’s executive culture, which suppressed internal dissent even as digital photography emerged. Dissenting engineers were ignored. Warnings went unheeded. They didn’t lack talent; they lacked the leadership capacity to let truth surface through tension.
Conflict aversion isn’t just uncomfortable; it’s catastrophically expensive. Think of Blockbuster dismissing Netflix’s disruptive model as a “niche concern”, or Kodak’s internal teams suppressing digital camera data to protect film divisions. These weren’t failures of vision alone; they were failures of conflict engagement.
While intense, this conflict engagement system surfaces blind spots ruthlessly. The friction isn’t personal; it’s laser-focused on making the work better. These aren’t cultures of chaos; they are meticulously designed ecosystems where friction is the fuel for excellence.
The neuroscience is clear: when constructive disagreement is stifled, the brain’s threat response activates, narrowing focus to self-preservation, killing creativity and critical thought. Conversely, when conflict is framed as a collaborative exploration (a “problem to be solved together” vs. a “battle to be won”), it triggers the brain’s reward circuitry, releasing dopamine and enhancing cognitive flexibility.
Moving from conflict avoidance to conflict mastery requires deliberate practice. Forget simplistic “conflict resolution” models. Focus instead on strategic friction design:
Normalise discomfort proactively: Don’t wait for conflict to erupt. Set the expectation in calm waters. Start team meetings with: “What’s one uncomfortable truth or potential disagreement we should be discussing today?” Frame dissent as a duty, not disloyalty. Publicly reward (not just tolerate) those who respectfully challenge the status quo or voice unpopular views. A tech CEO instituted a “Best Devil’s Advocate” award given monthly, shifting dissent from risky to prestigious.
Structure the debate, don’t suppress it: Unstructured conflict descends into chaos. Impose frameworks that force intellectual rigour and depersonalise the clash. Use techniques like:
a. The pre-mortem: “Imagine it’s 18 months from now, and this project failed spectacularly. What were the top 3 reasons? Now, how do we mitigate those today?” This forces critical examination.
b. Role-play reversal: “Split into teams. Team A argues for this strategy with all conviction. Team B must argue against it, finding every flaw. Then switch sides.” This builds empathy and exposes weaknesses.
c. The “And” stance: Ban “but”. Replace it with “and”. “Your data shows risk, AND we need to consider the market opportunity…” This simple linguistic shift acknowledges validity without negation, keeping dialogue open.
Focus on process, not personality: When friction arises, immediately redirect energy from who is right to what is right. Use objective criteria: “Let’s map this against our core customer metric: Will this approach increase their success rate by 10 percent?” or “Does this align with our three-year sustainability goal?” Implement a “Parking Lot” for personal attacks or unresolved emotional tension, acknowledge it and then return to task-focused debate. Train leaders to intervene not to stop conflict, but to refocus it.
Leaders who master friction understand a profound paradox: The pursuit of superficial harmony is the fastest route to stagnation and irrelevance. The messy, sometimes uncomfortable, collision of ideas is the crucible where breakthroughs are forged, and catastrophic errors are averted. By intentionally designing spaces for constructive conflict, normalising dissent, structuring debate, and relentlessly focusing on the problem, not the person, you don’t create a warzone; you build an intellectual powerhouse.
Your team’s best ideas are often buried under layers of politeness and fear. Your job isn’t to be the peacekeeper; it is to be the orchestrator of essential friction. Stop viewing disagreement as a threat to your authority. Start seeing it as the raw material of your next great leap forward.
Great leaders don’t just manage outcomes, they mature environments. And mature environments aren’t sterile; they are alive with questions, disagreement, and the kind of tension that stretches thinking without tearing relationships.
Think about your leadership right now. Is your team growing through friction or stalling under false peace? Are the meetings too quiet? Are the conversations too smooth? Is the feedback too filtered? That might not be a sign of unity, it may be the sound of unspoken truths hiding behind politeness.
The health of your culture isn’t how little people argue, it is how skillfully they do.
If your team never disagrees with you, they may not trust you with the truth. What would change if you stopped fearing friction and started treating it as the leadership tool it was always meant to be?
Dr Toye Sobande is a strategic leadership expert, executive coach, lawyer, public speaker, and trainer. He is the CEO of Stephens Leadership Consultancy LLC, a strategy and management consulting firm offering creative insight and solutions to businesses and leaders. Email: [email protected]
