Managing friction to leverage diversity

This guest article was written by Paul Volynski. Thank you so much for your contribution Paul.

 

Imagine your team is working on an important task and agrees it needs to move quickly. On the surface, everyone is on the same page. One colleague says, “Let’s just get moving.” Another hears the same words and starts scheduling a risk review.

Yet because team members have different professional and cultural backgrounds, they may interpret this differently. Some expect immediate action, while others expect more discussion, consultation, and risk assessment. They may simply be working from unspoken defaults about what “quickly” means.

Defaults are shaped by years of experience long before this moment and are rarely spoken aloud because nobody thinks to ask.

If you don’t clarify what “moving quickly” means, your colleagues develop mismatched expectations and communication starts to strain. This is why diversity does not automatically make teams better. It can also create tension between team members, making the work feel harder and less straightforward than it needs to be.

Every member of a diverse team brings early-learned patterns from their own background into how they reason at work. That means people can have very different expectations about communication, hierarchy, time, feedback, or how much risk feels acceptable. The same kind of gap that shaped what “moving quickly” meant a moment ago.

Unspoken assumptions compound into friction when a team has no shared way of clarifying them.

Here’s the difficult part. Different thinking patterns can lead people to draw completely opposite conclusions about the same thing.

That’s why, when these differences stay invisible, things start to go wrong.

You start responding to your interpretation of a colleague, rather than to what they actually meant. We interact with our interpretation of the other person, rather than with who they actually are.

From there, both sides keep building new assumptions on that subjective foundation, drifting further from common ground. Over time, repeated misunderstandings can make collaboration more effort-consuming and contribute to frustration or subgroup formation among colleagues who share a similar frame of thinking.

Subgroup formation shows up in ordinary ways:

• colleagues sharing information mainly within their own circle,
• leaving some people out of informal conversations,
• defaulting to familiar ways of working.

As contact between subgroups decreases, there are fewer opportunities to question assumptions and clarify intentions.

This leads to less information sharing, reduced trust, slower coordination, and weaker decisions within the team.

But this same friction can bring the team’s differing assumptions to the surface.

Friction is not necessarily a bad thing.

It’s tempting to think that a good team is one where people communicate easily, agree quickly, and almost never disagree. Yet if everyone approaches a problem in the same way, some useful questions may never be asked.

By contrast, a diverse team challenges assumptions that would otherwise remain invisible.

One person’s experience makes another person notice something they had never considered. A disagreement can reveal information that the team needs before making a decision. If your colleagues come from varied cultures, ages, and genders, those differences can become an advantage. It gives you access to a wider range of perspectives and the chance to process problems from angles you might not reach on your own.

The problem is not diversity itself. The question is what the team does with the differences.

Research on culturally diverse teams reflects this same tension: when team members struggle to interpret and integrate each other’s perspectives, conflict and reduced social integration become more likely. But when teams examine those perspectives openly, that same diversity fuels creativity and sharper problem-solving. The outcome depends on how the team works through the differences.

So how do you turn friction into an advantage?

It begins by learning to examine these interpretations instead of treating them as personal problems.

1. Make assumptions explicit.

Go back to that “move quickly” moment. If the team had spent two minutes agreeing on the timeline, the level of consultation, and who needed to sign off, much of the confusion could have been avoided. Ask these questions before the work begins. Once the team agrees on the timeline, the consultation process, and who signs off, everyone can act without working at cross-purposes.

2. Ask before interpreting.

If a colleague responds to “move quickly” by asking for more discussion, do not immediately interpret this as reluctance or a lack of commitment. Ask what information, consultation, or risk assessment they think is needed. More generally, when a colleague’s communication feels ambiguous, check what they meant before deciding why they behaved that way.

3. Separate disagreement from personal conflict.

Team members may disagree about the pace at which to proceed, how much consultation is needed, or who should sign off. That does not mean someone is less committed. The difficulty begins when a difference about the work becomes a judgement about the person.

4. Notice what the difference is giving you.

If a colleague takes a more cautious approach to “moving quickly,” ask what risk or information their perspective reveals. Use it to test the proposal, adjust the approach, or raise a question the team may otherwise have missed. Handled this way, a difference that initially slows the discussion helps the team make a better decision.

Diversity alone doesn’t make a team stronger. It becomes an advantage when the team takes shared responsibility for clarifying assumptions, making space for different perspectives, and using disagreement to improve its work.

In this way, diversity is not simply something a team has. It is something the team learns to work with.

If you would like support with team development, communication, or making better use of diversity in your organisation, please feel free to get in touch. I look forward to hearing from you.

References

Stahl, G. K., & Maznevski, M. L. (2021). Unraveling the effects of cultural diversity in teams: A retrospective of research on multicultural work groups and an agenda for future research. Journal of International Business Studies, 52(1), 4–22.