by Henna Pryor, CSP
I spend my days working with executive teams navigating rapid change, and honestly, the math is brutal. We talk a lot about the hard costs of employee turnover or botched strategy, but I want to talk about the silence tax—the quiet, insidious drain caused by leaders who just won’t disagree.
If you’re a senior employee, you already know this tax is real. In fact, research from the Axios HQ 2025 annual report shows that ineffective communication costs organizations roughly $54,860 annually for every senior employee earning over $200,000 in lost productivity.
That figure doesn’t capture the burnout. It captures the sheer amount of time we waste clarifying messages, delaying choices, and cleaning up avoidable mistakes.
When I’m keynoting for leadership teams, a pattern I hear repeatedly is the quiet admission of Decision Distress. That’s the feeling—shared by 85% of business leaders—of regretting, feeling guilty about, or questioning a major decision they made in the past year. These aren’t bad leaders. They’re often smart people paralyzed by the modern requirement to make choices faster, with more data, and surrounded by people who are culturally programmed to say, “Sounds great, boss.”
The Case for “Friction-maxxing”
To solve this, we need to lean into a concept recently introduced by Kathryn Jezer-Morton, columnist for The Cut. She calls it “Friction-maxxing.” While she applies it to our personal lives and parenting—building a tolerance for the “inconvenience” of being human—I believe it is the exact medicine required for the modern C-suite.
In a corporate world obsessed with “frictionless” experiences and “seamless” workflows, we have accidentally sanded down the very edges that allow us to grip reality. We have become so averse to the friction of a difficult conversation that we trade our long-term success for short-term comfort.
The Myth of Smooth Sailing
I recently worked with the executive teams at a major media company that was struggling to launch a much-needed rebrand. They were smart, well-meaning people who valued their internal harmony above all else. Every meeting started with five minutes of polite affirmations and ended with a general consensus that felt strangely empty.
The CEO, let’s call him Mark, had fallen in love with a slightly absurd creative concept: a series of black-and-white print ads featuring professional skateboarders, aiming for a “gritty nostalgia” feel. This was a TV-first company targeting suburban Gen X parents, but Mark was convinced this was the cool new way to project influence.
Everyone in the room knew the creative was a disaster. The VP of Marketing, Maria, actually ran the numbers showing that the campaign would tank their fourth-quarter metrics, but she felt too exposed to deliver the full bad news. She used vague language about “potential market resistance.” The CFO quietly filed the budget, shrugging off the inevitable cost overrun.
They approved the campaign. Six weeks later, the company spent millions pushing a campaign nobody understood. The internal teams—the people actually responsible for workplace performance—had to spend three months doing clean-up on a decision they all secretly hated. It wasn’t incompetence that broke them. It was comfort. They preferred false harmony to the friction of a courageous conversation.
The Power of Productive Conflict
This is what I see time and time again: leaders are allergic to productive conflict. We teach teams to be collaborative, but we accidentally teach them that “collaboration” means agreeing quickly. That’s not collaboration. That’s administrative compliance dressed up in a nice suit.
By friction-maxxing our communication, we acknowledge that disagreement isn’t an obstacle to the work—it is the work. If you see a major organizational risk and you keep quiet to protect your immediate psychological comfort, you are actively decreasing workplace performance.
What I see leaders underestimate is the operational damage caused by the simple failure to say, ‘Wait, I disagree.’”
It turns out, the best decision-making comes from a dynamic where disagreement isn’t punished, it’s prized. IBM’s 2024 CEO Study noted that sparring partners make the best leaders. The C-suite shouldn’t always agree. You need emphatic discussion that challenges assumptions to move beyond groupthink. If you are surrounded by ‘yes’ people, you aren’t leading—you’re echoing.
How to Turn Harmony into High Performance
If you lead teams or executives, you need to deliberately build social infrastructure around disagreement. Stop asking for consensus. Start friction-maxxing by asking for evidence-backed critique.
Here are three behavior shifts you can implement today to improve communication and influence:
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- STOP: Rewarding speed. When a decision needs to be made, don’t celebrate the person who agrees first. Reward the team member who flags the hardest-to-solve problem. The problem-finder is your most valuable asset in the change process.
- START: Insisting on pre-mortems. Before committing to a strategy, mandate that your teams spend fifteen minutes arguing for why the strategy will fail. Make it a mandatory, structured intellectual exercise. This process replaces hindsight regret with foresight preparedness.
- STOP: Using vague metrics. Maria, the VP of Marketing, used the phrase “potential market resistance.” That’s a “frictionless” phrase designed to avoid confrontation. I challenge my clients to use numbers and verbs: “This campaign will result in a 20% decline in Q4 lead volume.” Specificity forces the decision-making process to be evidence-based, not emotion-based.
When you allow silence to become the default response to uncertainty, you pay the Decision Delay Tax. That tax is real, and it’s stealing money, time, and influence from your business. If you want to increase your team’s workplace performance, you must cultivate the courage to make things awkward. The friction of a tough conversation today is always cheaper than the crisis it prevents tomorrow.
Who is Henna?
Henna Pryor, CSP is a Workplace Performance Expert, keynote speaker, Inc. Magazine columnist and 18x award-winning author of Good Awkward and the forthcoming The Signal Gap. She speaks to leaders and teams on influential communication, mindset, risk-taking, and navigating change and disruption. Frequently recommended for conferences, association meetings, corporate events, sales kickoffs, and leadership retreats. Wildly enthusiastic about dark chocolate and 90’s hip-hop.
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