Friction into Focus: The Leadership Advantage in Productivity

This session is a playbook for turning conflict into a competitive advantage, where dissent isn’t avoided or punished, but harnessed as the raw material of better culture and stronger performance, and it offers insight and experience to some of SAIT’s relevant products in this valuable Leadership space.

In this session, we’ll explore:

• How different personality types react in overextension so you can recognize predictable stress behaviours, de-escalate conflict, and rechannel energy.
• The benefit of different approaches to conflict why one size never fits all, and how to adapt your leadership to the moment.
• The importance of emotional regulation and agility equipping leaders to stay grounded, be agile in their emotions and model productive responses.
• The value of the performance conversation (vs. the review) shifting from backward-looking rituals to timely, forward-focused dialogue that drives improvement.

Friction into Focus: The Leadership Advantage in Productivity

You can be productive without leadership, teams will still check boxes, clear tasks, and hit quotas. In Canada, the reality is stark: unresolved conflict costs businesses over $2 billion annually*, and the average employee loses the equivalent of 55 working days* a year to stress and disputes. Managers, meanwhile, spend 25 - 40% of their time* handling conflict rather than leading. Productivity alone doesn’t prevent that drain. Leadership does.

Leadership is what makes productivity effective rather than just busy. It’s what converts conflict from a liability into an asset, turning dissent into debate, and friction into forward momentum. When leaders normalize healthy conflict, they create conditions where disagreement strengthens decisions, where accountability is clear, and where performance conversations actually change behaviour rather than collect dust.