The counterintuitive secret of leadership | Jessica Kriegel

**Modupe Akinola** (0:00)
For my 50th birthday, a few of my friends got together and threw me a very special birthday dinner. I mean, they just showered me with love. I remember looking around and seeing all of their faces and just feeling so happy to see each and every one of them and overwhelmed by how much they meant to me. And I wanted to express that to them, show some gesture of kindness and love in return. I wanted to send them all little gifts, little notes, but then time got the best of me and life got away from me.
Week after week, I'd say, I'll do it this weekend. But did I? Nope. I kept beating myself up. Finally, I talked to my therapist about it. She was like, what if you just let it go? They had a blast, you had a blast. They know how grateful you are.
She was asking me to surrender my vision of how I wanted things to be in a perfect world. In the real world, I didn't have time to send those notes, and my friends already knew how much they meant to me. What I learned? The act of surrender. It's more powerful than you might think.
I'm Modupe Akinola. This is TED Business, a podcast from TED.
Our speaker today, workplace culture expert, Jessica Kriegel, says that surrendering can be a counterintuitive strategy for productive leadership. In this talk, she explains how experimenting with loosening the reins can lead to a more adaptive workplace culture. Then after the talk, I'm presenting you with a challenge. But first, a quick break.
And now, Jessica Kriegel takes the TED stage.

**Jessica Kriegel** (1:54)
Every time I give one of these talks, I have a routine. Okay, I start by showing up early, and I do the sound check, I get the mic, and then I go in the halls, and I walk around, and I look at the audience, because I want to get a sense of the vibe. And really, where my mind starts to go is I prepare, you know, I get backstage, I sit down, and I start to think about all the things that I wish were a little bit different. You know, the things that are, they would be better if they were my way. So I wish the room was a little bit cooler, I wish the stage was a little bit bigger, I wish that the audience didn't look so hungover. No, you guys look great, not you. Sometimes, though, they look hungover, and I get worried. And I start focusing on all of the things that I can't control, because ultimately, I want to do a good job. You know, I'm a keynote speaker, and I've been hired to show up, and perform, and drive results, and I'm worried that all these things might prevent me from doing that.
And for leaders, you can probably relate, because this is actually a very natural coping mechanism to being under pressure. You, as a leader, have to drive results. It is harder than it ever has been to get results right now. You have increasing shareholder expectations at the same time as employee expectations are increasing. The rapid pace of change, the workforce generally is shifting so quickly, and yet you, as a leader, you still got to get those results. And so leaders tend to focus on what it is that they have to do to make it work, and they think about what they have to manage, every detail that they need to adjust the processes, and really the people, what they need to do differently.
But the reality is, control is an illusion. You can't control anything outside of yourself. The only thing you can control is the way that you show up.
So what if, instead of trying to force the world to fit into the way that you would like it to be, we tried something radical and unconventional. We tried surrender.
Now, surrender can feel like a touchy-feely word, especially when we're talking about leaders driving results. But let me demonstrate surrender right now in this talk, okay? I'm going to surrender. I'm going to stop talking and be quiet until someone says, now.
Now? Oh, that was fast. Well, thank you. It was so much easier than I thought it was going to be, and that's kind of the point of surrender. I was thinking you guys might take 30 seconds and make me stand here quietly, and it's uncomfortable to surrender. That's part of the point. That's part of why it's so hard to surrender. But what happened in that moment? I stepped back, and you, sir, you stepped in, and a new dynamic was created, and we did something different, and we co-created this moment together. Now, the problem with the control mindset is that it doesn't drive results because it chokes adaptability. And adaptive cultures win, not control cultures. I studied this with Stanford Graduate Business School a couple years ago. We looked at 243 companies. We looked at their purpose and their strategy, their culture, and obviously their results, and we wanted to know which kinds of companies won. And the companies that outperformed all other types were the adaptive companies. They outperformed control companies by three times. Over the course of three years, their revenue growth was significantly higher. So how do you create an adaptive culture? That is the question. Well, it's not by telling everyone that we're going to be adaptive now and controlling the adaptability of the room, right? The way that you create an adaptive culture is by understanding your role in the co-creation of it. So to surrender is not passive. It is not giving up. It is a radical acceptance of what you need to do in that moment that you actually have control of. Now, we know that results come from actions. People are trying to drive results by focusing on the actions that people are taking, which is that control mentality. But most leaders, they think that if they want to change those actions, they have to implement a bunch of processes and procedures and maybe new workflows, have a bunch of meetings, do KPIs and dashboards. And when you take that approach, you are in that control mindset. And what I found in 20 years of consulting is that people don't change because you implemented new processes. People will act in alignment with what they believe. And so if you want to change their behavior, you have to shift what it is that they believe. And once again, I can't control your beliefs, right? I can't say, okay, you're now going to be comfortable with risk-taking. Thank you. So that doesn't happen. But what I can do is I can create an experience, which I control, that will shift your belief. And that belief will have you then proactively choose to take a new action, which will drive a result.