Leaders Cannot Control Change, but They Can Shape Belief
Workplace culture expert Jessica Kriegel argues that leaders undermine adaptability when they try to control people, processes and the narrative around difficult decisions. In this TED talk, she makes the case for “surrender”: accepting what leaders cannot dictate while shaping their own conduct and the experiences that influence employees’ beliefs. Her examples—from early disclosure of a planned layoff to a factory manager removing reserved parking—frame trust, rather than compliance, as the basis for change.
Adaptability begins where control ends
Jessica Kriegel argues that leaders under pressure often try to control the wrong things: processes, people, workflows, dashboards and every detail that might derail performance. The pressure is real, she says. Shareholder expectations are rising alongside employee expectations, the pace of change is high, and leaders remain accountable for results.
But Kriegel’s premise is that control over those external variables is largely an illusion. A leader cannot dictate other people’s beliefs, choices or reactions. The controllable variable is the leader’s own conduct: how they respond, what experiences they create and how they show up.
That distinction matters because, in her formulation, a control mindset “chokes adaptability.” Kriegel says research she conducted with Stanford Graduate Business School examined 243 companies’ purpose, strategy, culture and results. She says adaptive companies outperformed control-oriented companies by three times; separately, she says their revenue growth was significantly higher over three years.
Her alternative is surrender—not passivity or an abdication of responsibility, but acceptance of circumstances a leader cannot change, paired with action on those they can. The mechanism is straightforward: people act in alignment with what they believe, she says, not simply because a new process has been introduced. Leaders cannot order someone to become comfortable with risk or committed to a change. They can create experiences that may shift belief, after which people can choose different actions.
You can’t control anything outside of yourself. The only thing you can control is the way that you show up.
Kriegel therefore treats meetings, KPIs, dashboards and revised workflows as incomplete answers when they are used to force behavioral change. They may define expectations, but they do not themselves produce commitment. “People don’t change because you implemented new processes,” she says. “People will act in alignment with what they believe.”
She demonstrated surrender by stopping her talk and waiting silently until someone in the audience said “now.” The pause was uncomfortable, she said, but it changed the dynamic: she stepped back, an audience member stepped in, and the moment was co-created. Her practical question for leaders is not how to make people comply, but what experience they can create that gives people reason to choose differently.
Early disclosure relinquished control of the layoff narrative
Jessica Kriegel describes a technology-company layoff as an example of using transparency rather than secrecy to shape the experience employees had of a difficult decision.
As the newly hired head of HR, she learned at her first board meeting that the company had to reduce its workforce by 20 percent and that she would oversee the process. The conventional approach, she says, is for executives to keep a prospective layoff confidential while they determine who will go, when to announce it and how to control the narrative. The organization then receives the decision and leadership handles the fallout.
Kriegel instead gathered employees the next day. She told them that the company had been instructed to lay off 20 percent of the workforce, that she did not yet know who would be affected or exactly when, and that she would communicate every step as the company worked through it.
The disclosure produced different responses. Some employees began applying for other jobs and left. Others saw the candor as a reason to remain, telling her they wanted to work for someone who would tell them the truth. Over the following months, Kriegel says, enough people left voluntarily that the company did not have to conduct layoffs. Those who stayed were more prepared to adapt to the business circumstances because they trusted the company’s directness.
Her point is not that transparency eliminated the underlying business constraint. The required reduction remained. Surrender, in this case, meant giving up the attempt to manage employees through a controlled narrative and choosing to disclose uncertainty instead.
“You can’t mismanage the truth,” she says.
At Ocean Spray, trust began with a parking-lot signal
Jessica Kriegel uses Ocean Spray’s Kenosha, Wisconsin, plant to show a different kind of intervention: removing a visible marker of hierarchy before asking employees to change their behavior.
The facility was the company’s worst-performing plant at the time, Kriegel says. It had the highest costs in the system, high injury rates and hostile union relations, and it was near shutdown. A new plant manager, Tim, was hired to turn it around.
Rather than begin with new mandates, performance requirements or threats to close the plant, Tim focused on the resentment and distrust he believed shaped workers’ behavior. Kriegel points to the parking lot as a daily expression of that divide. Workers arriving in the morning passed empty spaces reserved for managers, who did not arrive until the office day began.
Tim gathered employees outside, brought out a chainsaw and cut down every sign reserving spaces for managers. “Park wherever you want,” he told them, according to Kriegel.
The act did not solve every operational problem, she says, but it began to change what workers believed about the leadership around them. The message was that this manager might be different and might be trusted. That belief, in Kriegel’s telling, created greater willingness to adapt to the turnaround effort.
Kriegel says the plant subsequently reduced injuries by 75 percent, lowered costs and moved from near closure to becoming Ocean Spray’s top plant. The parking signs were not the central operating problem. They were a conspicuous experience Tim chose to change before telling workers what they needed to do differently.
The discipline is to master the response, not the conditions
For Kriegel, surrender means giving up the illusion of control rather than giving up on results. She invokes the Navy SEALs’ phrase “control the controllables” to make the point that leaders cannot determine other people’s actions, orders, equipment failures or changing conditions. The work is to respond and adapt to the situation at hand.
That is uncomfortable, she says, because it requires leaders to stop spending energy on how conditions should be and direct it toward the experiences they create for the people they influence. Employees retain free will; they will ultimately act differently only if they believe in what they are being asked to do.