Why Leaders Who Embrace Friction Experience Improved Outcomes

As a leader there is an expectation that you will improve various outcomes within the department, school, organization, or community you serve. This expectation may cause leaders to make changes that increase friction within the system that they lead. Leaders who embrace the friction caused by a change in expectations ensure that the changes they seek lead to improvement. Identifying and understanding friction within ourselves and the system allows effective leaders to continue to move toward improvement.

Learn why embracing friction leads to improved outcomes. In this session, you’ll learn how understanding and planning for friction will increase the chance of your change initiatives being successful. You will first learn where the friction comes from within yourself and then how to identify it in those that you wish to influence. Through an interactive process, you will learn how to design your best change initiative instead of relying on the one strategy we know does not work well: hope. During the process, you will learn the most common areas of friction, identify specific principles to overcome those areas, and create questions to help individuals reflect.

In this session, you will learn:

• The most common causes of individual friction that slows the rate of change
• Effective ways to provide support to reduce the impact of friction on improvement
• How to create questions that help individuals reflect on what is causing them to resist change