Can Friction Be a Team’s Superpower?
“Homogenous teams can go fast, but they can’t go far…”
Whenever I keynote, I watch carefully for where the audience feels challenged by something I’ve said. That moment when I see your head tilt to the side a bit, as you wrestle with the point I’m making. The slight shift in your posture when you sit upright and consider the discomfort of not fully agreeing with me.
As an educator at heart, these signals are gold for me because this is where your engagement skyrockets and where learning happens. These moments of friction are different from the connection bump I get from making a well-timed joke, or when I build trust with my audience by making them feel seen.
I recently wrapped up several months of keynoting at conferences focused on employee engagement, team effectiveness, and the future of work. My speaking tour took me from New Orleans to San Francisco to Toronto to Los Angeles to NYC to Atlanta to Dallas, and, finally, back to San Francisco. Across all these stages, I felt the palpable grist of friction when I would say “Homogenous teams can go fast, but they can’t go far…” Heads tilt. Shoulders raised. Let me explain what I mean here.
I think my audience perks up when I say this because, on face, it sounds like I’m saying something positive about homogenous teams, and this feels dissonant for leaders who’ve absorbed several decades of messaging on the value of diversity, or plurality. But, the reality is that sameness does allow for one advantage: speed.
When a group of people share communication patterns, language shortcuts, work styles, experiential/academic backgrounds, or other approaches to work, it allows the team to move quickly. Homogenous teams also have a lower management burden. The team leader can have average leadership and management skills and still achieve satisfactory outcomes from a team that requires less from them.
Or, as the kids say: basic team + basic leader = fast-track to meh outcomes. 🤣
In observational research studies of more homogenous versus more diverse teams, this reality shows up in the outcome data. Teams with increased similarity, combined with average leadership, are able to do satisfactory work. Here’s the problem: I’ve never met a team leader, or a business executive, who was satisfied with satisfactory work!
We want our teams to do the best work of their lives.
Well, it turns out that assembling a team that can move fast, due to a massive kickstart of similarity, is NOT the way to get there. These homogenous teams lack a key ingredient in achieving outperformance: friction.
Friction is the result of difference: different ideas, different academic backgrounds, different lived experiences, different ways of solving problems, different values, etc etc. Ideation and innovation processes rely on the productive power of friction to unlock the best outcome.
Think about the power of friction in your own life. Times of intense professional or personal growth rarely come when everything is gliding along smoothly. It is the moments of challenge, upheaval, feedback, strain, and even loss that produce tremendous innovation in our own development.
The same is true for high-performing teams. Friction generates better ideas, processes, and products. But, friction requires leaders to have the mindset and skill to turn difference into peak performance. The same study I referenced above points to this: more diverse teams with average management underperformed against homogenous teams with average management. This finding shows up in research going back several decades, consistently pointing to the same logic model:
High-performing teams require friction
Human difference, or complexity, is a great way to bake friction into your team
Complex teams require highly skilled leaders, or they underperform
My readers are not okay with basic/meh outcomes. And most of us lead complex teams - globally distributed, generationally diverse, mixed academic backgrounds, widely varying lived experiences…the differences are real and endless. So, what skills do leaders need to turn this complexity, and the inherent friction it brings, into their team’s superpower?
Welcome to the Alchemy of Talent, my radically simple model for leading high-performing teams. Over the next several newsletters, I’ll share examples of what I call “catalysts” - the leadership skills that turn complexity into outperformance. Stay tuned for:
How to cultivate trust, while leading teams through change
How to harness belonging to drive team performance
How to sustain connection to amplify team resilience
