You’re paying for it. You just don’t know how much. The cost of what you're not naming.

You already know something is off.

Maybe it’s your team not being able to make a decision without it constantly travelling upward. The restructure that landed on paper but hasn’t landed in the room. The merger that’s technically complete but where two cultures are still running in parallel, each waiting to see who moves aside.

You know it’s there. You’ve known for a while. What you probably haven’t done is put a number on it.

Let me be direct.

Leadership friction isn’t a soft problem. It’s a financial one. And most leaders are carrying its cost without ever calculating what it is.

This edition is a direct conversation about five things that happen when the 'something is off' aka friction goes unnamed in high-pressure change environments; and what it’s actually costing you.

#1: You’re not solving friction. You’re absorbing it.

In complex change like mergers, restructures and transformation programs, leadership friction tends not to announce itself as a problem. But it’s noisy.

A decision that should take three days takes three weeks. A leadership meeting that should land on a clear direction, circles and recircles. A capable person starts to go quiet in meetings. A project runs at 70% of what it should; and it is normalised as the new standard.

If you are the leader in the middle of all of this, you’re probably not ignoring it outright but you are absorbing it. Making broken things function through personal capacity. Covering the gap between what the structure is supposed to do and what it’s doing.

The problem is that absorption isn’t resolution; it’s merely a subsidy.

Every hour you spend managing what the system should be fixing is an hour you’re not spending on the actual work of leadership. And it compounds.

Try this: Make a short list of three things you’re currently managing that shouldn’t have reached your level. Because the system is pushing them up. That list is the beginning of your friction audit.

Insight: Friction doesn’t disappear because you’re good at absorbing it. It just moves somewhere less visible; into your time, your team’s energy, and eventually your delivery.

#2: The decisions that aren’t being made are the ones costing you most.

One of the most expensive patterns in complex change environments is decision avoidance. We tell ourselves it is rigour but often it is not adding anything to our decision making.

More consultation, another alignment session, a quick check in, validating with the board. It feels responsible and can look like thoroughness. But underneath it, often, is a leadership team that isn’t clear on authority, isn’t aligned on direction, or isn’t willing to be wrong in front of each other.

In post-merger environments particularly, this is endemic. Two organisations that each had a way of deciding are now supposed to share one; but nobody’s actually agreed what that looks like. So, decisions travel upward, stall, or are relitigated.

We wrongly attribute the highest cost to decisions that go wrong. But are you calculating the ones that never get made at all?

How often have you allowed a project to limp longer than it needed to? Have you had a conversation that felt like it had been done to death but kept resurfacing? When was the last time you were waiting for clarity from your leader, but it didn’t come because their leader was waiting for the same thing? Probably more than you would like to admit.

Try this: Identify one decision you have been waiting on from your leader, for more than four weeks. Write down what’s blocking it, the real reason, not the one that has been shared with you. Is it information? Or is it authority, alignment, or discomfort? How much has the follow up, rework or time lost cost you?

Insight: Decision avoidance has a daily cost. It shows up in lost time, stalled work, rework and burned energy.

#3: The real decisions aren’t happening in the room.

There’s a pattern I see consistently in high-friction change environments and it’s one of the most expensive things nobody’s measuring.

The meeting ends. The agenda items are ticked. And then, in the corridor, in the car park, on the way back to the desk, the real conversation happens.

“That’s not actually going to work.”

“Did anyone else notice that nobody addressed the obvious question?”

“I’ll just wait and see what actually gets decided.”

This is a rational response to a leadership environment where the friction in the room is high enough that honesty has become too costly to offer publicly. So, it goes underground. And underground is where it gets expensive.

Because the decisions that get made in corridors aren’t documented. They’re not always tested against the right information with the right people who should be part of them. And they create a parallel operating reality; what the organisation officially decided versus what people are doing in practice, that compounds until something breaks.

In M&A environments particularly, this is fraught. Two cultures, two sets of loyalties, two versions of how decisions should be made. The formal meetings are where the approved narrative lives but often the corridor is where the real conversations happen.

And the gap between them has a dollar figure attached. Duplicated effort, ineffective decisions, rework, risks not appropriately captured and managed, not to mention the emotional energy drain and that comes from maintaining two parallel conversations indefinitely.

Try this: Before you end your next leadership team meeting, check in on what was unsaid. You’ll know by a loaded pause or a question that seemed glossed over. Have that conversation before you end.

Insight: When honesty becomes too expensive to offer in the room, it doesn’t disappear, it relocates. And the decisions made outside the formal conversation are almost always more costly than the ones made inside it.

#4: Change fatigue is real. But what’s underneath it is more expensive.

Most leaders in sustained change environments know their teams are tired. What gets talked about far less is what sits under the fatigue.

It’s not just that people have been through a lot. It’s that they’ve been through a lot without a landing point. Every “we’re almost through it” has been wrong. Every restructure has been followed by another. Every AI implementation has arrived before the last one was embedded.

Teams don’t burn out from change. They burn out from change that feels purposeless, relentless, and poorly led.

And when that happens, the best people, the ones with the most options, calculate the cost and make a call. It might not be by leaving, but by retreating and offering less than they normally would.

Retention risk in complex change environments is almost never sudden, instead it’s accumulated. And by the time it’s visible, it’s already expensive.

Try this: Think about your two or three highest performers right now. When did you last have a real conversation with each of them? An honest conversation about how they are and how they are coping?

Insight: The cost of losing a senior person mid-transformation isn’t just the replacement cost. It’s the knowledge, the relationships, the momentum, and the signal it.

#5: You haven’t calculated the cost. That’s part of the problem.

Here’s what I’ve noticed over 20 years of working with leaders in complex change: friction doesn’t feel like a discrete problem, and managing it seems easier than solving it. Which means it continues. All of it has a cost.

I built a calculator that does something simple: it helps you put a number on what leadership friction is costing in your specific context. Your team size, your situation, your type of friction. Conservative assumptions. Takes about four minutes.

I built it because, in my experience, a number that feels more tangible can change the conversation. Inaction stops feeling like patience and starts feeling like a choice with a price tag.

Try this: Try the calculator before your next leadership team review. It's not to sound the alarm but to make the cost visible. You can find it at louisezawadaleadership.com. Four minutes. Free. Your numbers will be your own.

Insight: You can’t manage what you haven’t measured. And you can’t make a clear decision about something whose cost you’ve never seen.

Here’s the real question.

How long have you known something was off? Leadership friction doesn’t resolve itself. It gets absorbed until the cost becomes hard to ignore.

Remember Lead Lightly was never meant to mean lead easily. It means lead without carrying more than is yours to carry.

If this is where you are right now; in the middle of a merger, a restructure, an AI transformation that’s feeling harders than it should, find out the true cost and use it as evidence that what you are feeling is real. Then do something about it. Not sure where to start? You know where to find me.

📩 If you’re carrying leadership friction through a major change and need a thinking partner, book a 30-minute call.