Episode 109

Rowing Through Treacle: When Friction Becomes the Culture

Companies spend $140 billion a year training leaders, yet trust in leadership keeps sinking. Jimmy Burroughes has a different diagnosis: the real problem is leadership friction built into the system your managers work inside.

Jimmy spent years leading in the British Army before bringing that discipline into corporate consulting, working with organizations like Bank of America, Samsung, and Walmart. Then he burned out completely and lost his job, his relationship, and his home in quick succession. What he built afterward challenges a core assumption in leadership development, that capable managers who seem stuck simply need more coaching. What if leadership friction sits in the system around them instead?

On this episode of The Business Emergency Room, Jimmy and host Maartje van Krieken unpack the forty-three friction points his team has identified across organizations, including unclear decision rights and the hidden cost of constant task switching. They dig into why experienced managers keep escalating decisions they already know the answer to, and why adding more process usually deepens the friction.

Jimmy offers a blunt diagnostic any leader can run without hiring a consultant: ask a few people their top three priorities and listen for the pattern. The answers reveal more about leadership friction and organizational health than any engagement survey ever could.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Why $140 Billion in Leadership Training Isn't Working

06:18 Signs Your Organization Has a Leadership Friction Problem

10:12 The Real Root Causes of Workplace Friction

13:54 A Real-World Example of Decision Making Breakdown

20:47 Why Adding More Process Makes Friction Worse

22:47 The Hidden Cost of Multitasking and Task Switching

26:38 A Simple Way to Diagnose Leadership Friction in Any Team

Connect with Jimmy Burroughes:

Visit the JBL High Performance Website

Jimmy Burroughes is a former British Army Officer turned global leadership transformation expert and the founder of JBL High Performance. With experience leading up to 110 personnel across European and Middle East operations, Jimmy has translated the precision of military leadership into a practical methodology that Fortune 500 companies around the world rely on.

He has partnered with organisations including Bank of America, eBay, Samsung, Walmart, Fonterra, and SkyCity — designing enterprise-wide leadership programmes that have reached 1,000+ staff in single engagements across 8 countries.

Jimmy is the creator of the "Simplify to Amplify" methodology, which helps exhausted executives escape reactive, firefighting leadership and reclaim significant time, without sacrificing results. His clients consistently report reclaiming 10+ hours per week and achieving measurable performance improvements within 90 days.

He is the author of two books: Beat Burnout & Ignite Performance and Escape the Multitasking Trap, and is the host of The High Performance Leader Podcast, ranked in the Top 10% globally.

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

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The Business Emergency Room: For Leaders Facing Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity & Ambiguity (VUCA)
Triage, Tools & Tactics to recover from or prevent business chaos in this VUCA business environment

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Maartje van Krieken

Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist, executive consultant, and your at host of The Business Emergency Room podcast, where growing businesses go when things get messy. With a career that began in frontier oil and gas and spanned war zones, boardrooms, and billion-dollar pivots, Maartje has spent over two decades helping organizations steer through chaos and come out stronger.
Now through her consulting firm, The Chaos Games, Maartje works with medium-sized businesses, especially those scaling rapidly or navigating uncertainty, to diagnose breakdowns in leadership, collaboration, and decision-making before they become business emergencies. Her signature approach blends practical triage, people-first strategy, and blunt Dutch honesty to help teams realign fast.

​The Business Emergency Room delivers high-impact insights for business leaders, board members, and investors who are tired of the symptoms, disconnection, friction, paralysis, and want the tools to fix what’s really going wrong. Maartje’s episodes cut through fluff with stories, frameworks, and metaphors that turn even the most complex chaos into something leaders can act on.
Maartje is based in New Orleans and speaks regularly on navigating organizational storms, building business resilience, and turning reactive firefighting into proactive leadership. Whether you’re scaling a business, running a team, or dealing with dysfunction, The Business Emergency Room is the place to find straight talk and smarter tools.