Friction vs Flow at Work: Leadership Clarity for Better Results

Part 1 of our 4-part conversation on shifting our leadership from friction to flow..

What’s the difference between friction and flow in the workplace? In this episode of the Relationships at Work podcast, host Russel Lolacher sits down with Margaret Graziano — CEO of KeenAlignment and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Ignite Culture. Together they define friction in leadership, explore how it wastes energy and productivity, and explain how clarity helps leaders shift their people and organizations into flow.

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Transcript

Russel Lolacher: And on the show today we have Margaret Graziano, and here's why she is awesome. She's an author, keynote speaker, and CEO founder of Keen Alignment, a consultancy helping to integrate people and strategic resources to shape constructive high performing cultures. She's a Forbes contributor and member of their Coach's Council, and she's a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Ignite Council. Ignite culture. It's one of those important things you gotta get... the book. Ignite Culture, Empowering and Leading a Healthy, High Performance Organization From the Inside Out and we get to chat to her today. Hello Maji.

Margaret Graziano: Hello. Thank you for having me. Glad to be here. I gotta adjust my lights, but I'll deal with it for now.

Russel Lolacher: Totally get that. It's all these things with the podcast now. You have to understand the visuals as much as the audio. It's everything.

Margaret Graziano: Yep, yep.

Russel Lolacher: Excited to talk about friction and flow today, especially as a leader, especially as it pertains to relationships in the workplace. But first I have to ask the one question I ask all of my guests, Maji, to kick us off, which is from your experience, what's your best or worst employee experience?

Margaret Graziano: I, I think my best employee experience, it doesn't mean this was the best company. This was a experience inside the company. Unfortunately, it was my first job because it was a long time ago. And they hired people who were all really focused on achieving in the role. So we were all there for the right reasons.

We were all focused on placing people. I was in recruiting, and so the, they were, we were in a bullpen. Bullpen means no cubicles and desk one, desk two, desk three, desk four, desk five, desk six, desk seven. And so as a rookie, I got to watch these amazing producers in action, and I got to see how they did it and how they talked to people.

And and how they celebrated their success. They would ring a bell or one woman would take out her calculator and add a per commission. It was just, I don't know what would've happened in my career had I not had that experience with the other women, they were all women, in that office. Now I've had many bad experiences in management or worst experiences in as an employee, but same company, I'll just leave it at that. Same company wanted us to not be friends so they forough us from socializing after work, from doing things. And at that company you had to like raise your hand and ask to go to the bathroom. It was really crazy. And one day straight commission, single moms and single people, they hired for the most part.

My son was potty training and we were driving to daycare and he said, I have to go now. And I was on a time schedule and I was like, no, you can't. I can't stop. Because if you were late for work, every minute you were late for work, they would take you off a rotation for candidates and it and your straight commission. Right? So there was no leeway. There was so much. What do you want to call this?

Russel Lolacher: Rigidity?

Margaret Graziano: Yeah. And so just to share on a fun note, we would sneak out of work after work. All of us would drive 10 minutes in a different direction and then meet back at the baseball field and play baseball.

Russel Lolacher: On one hand, I love the idea that you're seeing modeled behavior from your peers, especially brand new to... I mean, when I ask this question, it's almost always from decades ago, which really shows how impactful those early experiences are to the rest of your career. Good? Modeled behavior. Bad? It's trauma you're carrying with you forever.

But also on the other side is this organization's dehumanizing the hell out of you and your team and you're going, you know what? We're gonna make us humans to each other. We're gonna make this network, this community. I love that fighting in the face of a horrible culture. And it will find, life will find a way.

Isn't that the Jurassic Park quote? Life will find a way

Margaret Graziano: Yeah. Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: So let's set the table, let's find out what we're talking about. Defining is such a big part of my show and I think it's a really important thing to do, especially 'cause the workplace doesn't do it. Friction and flow. How would you define both of those terms in a workplace, in a leadership context?

Margaret Graziano: All right, I am gonna show you first friction to flow. So friction, I will describe it and then I will give you examples of it from right now in, in, in my client life. Friction is you're in a meeting and the boss is asking questions and you're answering, and the boss doesn't like the answers and so makes a snarky comment publicly.

Says that's wrong. Publicly berates, pushes, thwarts. But usually it shows up as sarcasm, snideness, comments after the fact. Oh, look at you being innovative and condescending. That causes friction, not just for the person who's on the receiving end, but everybody else witnessing it says, I don't wanna be in that firing line.

Other friction is new guy coming in and not assessing the situation and making all these changes and not really understanding. So it's, it's when people are operating below the power and freedom line, it's when they're in a state of frustration, fear. I actually did opposite of what I was gonna say.

I'm, I'm giving you examples and then describing, but in frustration, fear, or hopelessness or any of those below the power in freedom line moods or feelings or experiences. When a person is below the power in freedom line, they do not feel empowered. They feel trapped. They feel stuck. When that happens to a person, the body releases at a toxic level, stress hormones, chemicals like adrenaline, cortisol, neurophin, and we go into our lowest survival state. So it's like sand in the gears to get things done. You're, you're trying to get something done and you're approaching somebody from a different department and they're stonewalling you or I'm, now I'm going back to giving examples.

Somebody wants to communicate to you, but they cc everybody involved so that they can cover their own ass and that they can call you out for not doing your job. It can be a process that's cumbersome. It can be a meeting that's hard to get through. It could be a meeting where nobody is doing anything bad to each other.

It's just another boring meeting, talking about nothing. And nothing gets done and everybody's on their phones or they're typing. That's friction. When, when you're trying to talk to me and I'm talking to someone else or I'm on my phone and you feel what you have to say, doesn't matter. Friction. So friction is any time there is not a state of courage and engagement you can count on. There is something in the space, either it's a mood, it's a process, it's a behavior, it's an action, it's a reaction, and it slows things down. As a matter of fact, when we go into companies and we see that we, or we're called in, right, we, we don't just show up out, out of the clear blue sky we're called in. Either there was a complaint or there was a lawsuit, or there's a change in leadership. And the new leader is smart enough to know, oh my gosh, we need to reset the, the table here. Like we gotta start over. When I sit down and talk to people and interview people, turns up that almost 30 to 40% of their time is not being spent being productive when there's a state of friction. Because when there's a state of friction, depending on how low down that vibrational scale you go. Like if you're in hopelessness, you'll reach out to other people. So now you're sharing the wealth of your trauma so you can trauma bond and you're bringing others in, which is just as much friction as the original incident that happened between two people.

But now I'm bringing people with me 'cause it makes me feel better, but I'm actually taking away from the company. Is this making sense?

Russel Lolacher: Absolutely, absolutely. My, my curiosity is what's causing, what's, what triggers friction?

Margaret Graziano: So in a client we're working with right now, they have a big hairy audacious goal. The number's super high. It's not realistic, which is okay for a BHAG, but the CEO has confused BHAG and must get it done.

So now all these people think we're reaching for the stars. We'll wind up at the moon. The moon's not enough. So you're bad, you're bad, you're bad, you're bad, you're bad. You all suck. You're all not capable of doing this. And the CEO is making promises to stakeholders and shareholders and funders that we're gonna hit. You know this happens all the time in Silicon Valley. Happens everywhere.

And so there's this mass disconnection between goal and reality. Big source of friction. Another source of friction is poor behavior from leadership at all levels that's been allowed to, to metastasize. So if, if I am rough on people and it works, like my first company, they were harsh with us. Yes, we rang the bell.

Yes, we got big commissions, but if we were late, we were punished, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I couldn't go to the bathroom. If that works and your brain is saying, oh, that works, keep doing it. You're gonna keep doing it. So that poor behavior. Also what causes friction is the interaction. Between these multiple people on the executive team.

Let's say you have a stickler for details and you have a perfectionist that it must be done her way or no other way, and then you have a controller, not like the title, but personality trait. I wanna know what you're doing. So you have these three maniacal over the top saboteur behaviors. Now let's throw in for shits and giggles you have a hyper achiever. So you have all these people with these over-emphasized strengths to the point where they're using them and they are weaknesses, and together they're toxic. And we've got a client right now, almost the entire executive team has toxic behaviors. And then you've got these aggressive defensive behaviors.

But then, and everyone likes the passive defensive 'cause they're nice, but it's just as bad. So you have the aggressive behaviors, let's say on half of the team, which is very typical. Then you have passive behaviors on the other half of the team. So they, they don't say anything. They have cordial hypocrisy.

They do this. But really they mean this. So they tell these people on this side of the aggressive defensive equation that they're gonna get the work done, it'll be done. They make promises they don't keep, then they don't tell them the whole story. They hide. So part of passive defensiveness is compliance, complacency, avoiding, and conforming. Did I? Yeah. And conforming. So they don't tell the truth. This is where cordial hypocrisy sits. They're so afraid of the aggressive defensive. And because of Trump and others, maybe Elon too. Everyone doesn't like the aggressive defensive, but they don't pay attention of what got the aggressive defensive to be even more aggressive and defensive.

And when the passive is passive, when they hide numbers, when they lie, when they don't do what they say they're gonna do, because they're in self-protection mode, it sets this group off even worse. So you have this. It's just like our political system. The, the, the pendulum swings too far. We give too much.

We, we have so, so much bloat in government that the new people come in and say, everybody's fired. We're gonna, you know, it's extreme behavior. This is a long way for me to say extreme behavior, and you can point it down if you study human systems. Not saying all you guys need to study human systems, but if you just look at like family systems, relationship systems, it's behavior, it's moods, it's consequence. And when there is no rules of engagement, we're not gonna yell, we're not gonna scream, we're gonna speak to people with respect, we're gonna do what we say we're gonna do, we're gonna be accountable, we're going to tell people to their face what's not working, we're going to have a rubber chicken that we throw in the middle of the meeting. When things have gotten off base, when it's gotten rough, somebody needs to stand up for what's right. And in most of these organizations, no one says a word. They just say, I can't wait to get outta here. Including the aggressive people.

The aggressive people are just as unhappy as the defensive. They're both defensive, by the way. It's aggressive, defensive versus passive defensive. And you said it earlier, most of this behavior that we're seeing in the workplace that is counterproductive is leftover from wounds from childhood between the ages of three and seven, nine and 13 and 18 and the first time we leave home, all children, Erickson's Eight Stages of Development, have big incidents that happen to them that help them form their personality. Their personality is created as Joe Dispenza says, through their personal reality. Well, something happened. I had to yell at my son, my 2-year-old son to that he couldn't go poo poo, and, and we couldn't stop until we got to the daycare.

The kid was potty training. I mean, I was 20 and he's, you know, 22. But still I didn't know any better. I was just like, please hold it. Like he can't hold it. He's learning. Now i'm 60, so now I see all that stuff. The point is that that, oh my God, I'm gonna lose my job. I'm gonna take, get taken off rotation, like there's punishment for me.

You know? Can you imagine what this does to your nervous system? At 22 years old, I was an aggressive defensive leader of a recruiting company. I had 14 people. I never wanted anyone to have to work under the pressure I worked under, so nobody was straight commission. How well do you think that works in a recruiting company when no one's straight commission?

Nobody produced. I had a, I brought a consultant and he says, which one of your parents was the alcoholic? I said, why do you say that? He says, you're running your company like a codependent. So, and I had both sides. I had aggressive, defensive and passive. Father, my father was aggressive, defensive, a Taurus, a Sicilian, and an addict.

And he was, was a, an owner of his own company and he produced and he had food in the refrigerator all the time, but he was not a nice person. My mother was codependent, super sweet, pretended everything was great, ignored the problems. You know, every one of us can say, we've got examples like this in our life.

So as kids, something happens, we cope. Our amygdala tells us something is wrong. We scan the environment and say, this doesn't feel good. I wanna be more like this. I want to feel better. Maybe I'm more like that. And boom, we put it in. That's how we become hyper achievers, restless, avoiders. People pleasers controllers because whatever we were being was not enough.

So we have a compensatory personality trait or behavior. We lead with that and we've got three of them. We lead with it. And until we get to the point that what got us here is no longer sufficient to get us there, then we know I've got an intervention right now. I don't know if, I don't know if the board is gonna let this person stay. I've interviewed 28 people. They use words like bully, condescending, aggressive, avenger. And, and the thing is, this person has saved this company from going out of business. They've raised all sorts of money, they've done wonderful things, but all the things that make them successful in the field are eating them alive with their own people. And the board called me because they wanted the person to transform, but now they're really second guessing. Is she capable and does she really want to?

Russel Lolacher: It is funny that, so, and we don't talk about this enough, that leaders aren't generally made and born in the workplace. They are made and born at home. They are made and born through their experiences growing up to create the person. That's why I always find it funny when we talk about leadership development.

I'm like, it's not though, it's personal development. We are actually teaching you to be better people. It's not as much about leadership in a corporate sense. It's are you somebody that people we're gonna follow? Do you know how to relate and engage and empathize and, and compassionate? So I love that you're bringing this up from the historical, you know, traumatic or also good sense, like you can be, you can have amazing experiences which you can bring into the workplace as well. So

Margaret Graziano: It's traumatic experiences though, that create toxicity.

Russel Lolacher: And the friction for sure abs. So let's fix everything, Magi!

Margaret Graziano: Yeah. So let's talk about, let's talk about flow. Let's talk about flow. So first and foremost great parenting and conscious parenting creates better humans. Unfortunately, the sixties were an interesting time and a lot of in the seventies and the eighties, and a lot of people that are running companies right now are running companies from their highest level of what works in their behavior and that doesn't work interpersonally. All you have to do is look at the divorce rate among leaders of companies so well in, in the world. So you're a hundred percent right. I think leadership development is a waste of money if you don't first teach people response agility.

How am I being when circumstances are stressful, volatile, uncertain, chaotic, complex, confusing, ambiguous, when I don't get what I want, when when I'm failing, how do I behave? When we just react, that's Daniel Goldman like, emotional intelligence. And if you look back at his roots, he was, he was one of the people that met with Maharaji in India to learn meditation.

He comes back to this country and writes this book about how people can calm down their nervous system, calm down their, their self. So in a state of flow, your body, your mind and your spirit need to be in homeostasis. There's a lot of research out there from the Flow Research Collective. I've taken training with them.

It's very, very good, but it flow begins with me. Flow begins with me understanding my triggers and not falling prey to my ego. It's just the ego saying, you know, Margaret, those people are in your way. You are not gonna be successful with those people. This person's doing that. And then I'm, no, I have to say thank you for sharing. Goodbye. Who I am. Is that people are liberated, and that includes myself. That's why I have that compass there. That's why I have that compass here. My North star is, people are liberated and it begins with me. Liberated from what? My own ego, my own chains, from my own past, my own stories, my own judgments. If I can be liberated and shift and teach people to shift and they can be their highest and best self, then people can be liberated, especially at work.

So flow is a peak state that Anthony Robbins talks about that, that Stephen Cutler talks about. That the man who wrote the book, the original book on flow, which I can't pronounce his name, looks German or whatever, but you can just look it up anyway. Flow is a peak state. We're in a state of belief. We know things will improve. We're engaged, we're all in, and we're trying new things. On the vibrational scale, we're in the state of 5-50 Hertz, which means we're expanding instead of adrenaline, cortisol, and neurophin. We've got serotonin, oxytocin dopamine and endorphins, and so we could see more clearly. We're open to new ideas.

We're not threatened by our own ego and our own insecurity. We know that the collective intelligence is way better than our own limited perspective. So in a state of flow, you see what you can't see. You accomplish much, much more, and you're happy. And when people are happy and in a state of joy, they are 70% more effective.

The Flow Research Collective says 200% more effective. David Hawkins work on, on neuroscience and consciousness says minimum 70% more effective. But when you're in a state of flow, you don't touch things six times. You don't do rework. You look at one thing and you see the domino effect of, if I do this, I've also done this, this, this, and this.

Which makes you much more productive. When you are in a state of friction. You look at the same index card, look at it again. Look at it again. Look at it again. Move it over here. Move it over here. Move it over here. You spill your coffee. You do, you do a lot of things over, and so you're less productive because your brain, you have no access to your prefrontal cortex when you're in a state of friction. When you're in a state of flow, your left and right hemisphere is completely integrated.