The Counterintuitive Secret of Leadership | Jessica Kriegel | TED
- Aisha Washington
- 1 hour ago
- 6 min read
Leaders are expected to produce results amid uncertainty. That pressure often encourages them to tighten oversight, add procedures, and manage every variable they can see. Yet the more complex an organization becomes, the less realistic total control is—and the more that pursuit can restrict the flexibility a team needs.
In her TED talk, workplace culture strategist Jessica Kriegel proposes a counterintuitive response: leaders should learn to surrender. She does not mean abandoning responsibility or accepting poor performance. She means recognizing the limits of control, responding deliberately to present conditions, and creating experiences that enable people to adapt together.
Why the Instinct to Control Can Become a Liability
Trying to exert control is an understandable reaction to pressure. When revenue declines, a transformation stalls, or a team misses its goals, leaders naturally want to intervene. They may introduce tighter reporting, prescribe more detailed workflows, or become involved in decisions previously left to others.
These measures can provide a temporary feeling of order. The danger arises when leaders confuse that feeling with genuine influence.
Markets move, customer expectations evolve, employees interpret decisions differently, and unexpected events disrupt even carefully constructed plans. A leader can influence these conditions but cannot dictate all of them. Pretending otherwise consumes energy and may discourage employees from exercising judgment when circumstances change.
Kriegel argues that excessive control can therefore undermine adaptability. People become accustomed to waiting for instructions, protecting themselves from blame, or complying with a process even when it no longer fits the situation. The organization may appear orderly while gradually losing its capacity to respond.
Surrender Is Acceptance, Not Abdication
The word “surrender” can sound incompatible with leadership. It may suggest defeat, passivity, or a refusal to take responsibility. Kriegel uses it in a different sense: surrender means releasing the fantasy that every outcome can be controlled.
This begins with a clear appraisal of reality. What has already happened? Which constraints cannot be removed? What remains open to influence? By accepting the first two, leaders can direct their attention toward the third.
That distinction makes surrender an active discipline. A surrendered leader still sets expectations, makes difficult decisions, and remains accountable for results. The difference is that action is grounded in current reality rather than in an attempt to force certainty where none exists.
Kriegel connects this idea to the principle of controlling the controllable, a mindset commonly associated with high-pressure military environments. Effective performance does not require command over every external event. It requires mastery of one’s preparation, attention, choices, and response.
Adaptive Cultures Are Co-Created
Kriegel contrasts control-oriented cultures with adaptive ones. A control culture depends heavily on rules, centralized decisions, and efforts to eliminate variation. An adaptive culture is better able to notice change, revise assumptions, and coordinate a response without waiting for every answer to come from the top.
She cites research indicating that adaptive organizations can outperform control-focused organizations by roughly three times over a three-year period, including substantially stronger revenue growth. The broader lesson is not that structure is unnecessary. It is that structure alone cannot produce responsiveness.
Culture emerges from the repeated experiences people have inside an organization: what leaders reward, what they tolerate, how they communicate uncertainty, and whether employees are trusted with meaningful choices. For that reason, a leader cannot simply design a culture and impose it like a policy.
The leader’s role is to participate in creating the conditions from which culture develops. That includes modeling the desired behavior, making symbolic choices that alter expectations, and inviting employees to contribute to the organization’s response.
Why New Processes Rarely Create Lasting Change
Organizations frequently approach cultural problems as procedural problems. If collaboration is weak, they add meetings. If accountability is unclear, they install another tracking system. If innovation is slow, they establish a formal innovation program.
Processes can support change, but Kriegel argues that they do not automatically cause it. People do not transform simply because a new workflow appears in their inbox.
Behavior tends to reflect belief. An employee who believes senior leaders punish honest mistakes will remain cautious, regardless of how often a policy encourages experimentation. A team that believes management has already made every important decision will treat an invitation to contribute as theater.
To change behavior, leaders must address the beliefs underneath it. Kriegel’s model can be understood as a sequence:
Create an experience that challenges an existing assumption.
Allow that experience to form or reinforce a new belief.
Make a different action feel credible.
Let repeated actions generate new results.
This places more responsibility on leadership behavior. Announcing trust is easy; giving employees a consequential choice makes trust tangible. Declaring transparency is simple; communicating openly when the news is incomplete proves whether transparency is real.
Transparency During a Workforce Crisis
Kriegel illustrates the idea with the story of a newly hired HR leader at a technology company. Soon after taking the role, this executive was instructed to reduce the workforce by 20 percent.
The conventional approach would have been to plan the layoffs confidentially, finalize a list, and reveal the decision only when every detail was settled. Instead, the HR leader acknowledged what could and could not be controlled. The business problem was real, but employees’ reactions and future choices could not be scripted.
The company gathered its employees and explained that a significant reduction was needed, while also admitting that the exact plan had not yet been determined. Such openness introduced uncertainty, but it also treated employees as adults capable of responding to the truth.
The experience changed how people interpreted the company’s leadership. Some employees voluntarily pursued other opportunities. Others valued the candor and decided they wanted to help the business recover. According to Kriegel, enough voluntary movement occurred that the company reached an appropriate workforce size without executing the planned layoffs.
Just as importantly, those who remained had experienced trust during a difficult moment. That experience supported a more resilient relationship with management and made the workforce better prepared to adapt to changing conditions.
The lesson is not that early disclosure will always eliminate layoffs. It is that transparency can expand the range of possible responses. By surrendering control over how every person would react, the leader created room for employees to participate in solving the problem.
How One Symbolic Act Changed an Ocean Spray Plant
A second example concerns Tim, a new manager assigned to Ocean Spray’s plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The facility was reportedly the company’s worst-performing plant, and relations between workers and management were burdened by distrust and resentment.
A command-and-control turnaround might have begun with new targets, tighter supervision, and consequences for missing performance standards. Tim instead looked for the beliefs maintaining the existing culture. If employees saw management as privileged, distant, and uninterested in fairness, another performance program would do little to change their behavior.
He responded with a visible act: using a chainsaw, he removed signs reserving parking spaces for managers. Employees could now park wherever they chose.
Removing parking signs did not directly redesign production or improve safety procedures. Its power came from what the experience communicated. It challenged the accepted hierarchy and provided physical evidence that the new manager intended to relate to workers differently.
Kriegel reports that the plant subsequently achieved major gains, including a 75 percent reduction in injuries, and eventually became Ocean Spray’s leading facility. The turnaround was surely larger than one dramatic gesture, but the gesture helped establish a new belief about leadership. That belief made different forms of cooperation and performance possible.
Turning Surrendered Leadership Into Practice
Surrendered leadership does not require theatrical acts or radical disclosure in every situation. Its practical value lies in changing the questions a leader asks.
When facing a difficult outcome, begin by separating facts from aspirations. Identify what has already occurred, what lies beyond your authority, and which decisions remain yours to make. This prevents frustration with uncontrollable conditions from distorting the response.
Next, examine the beliefs shaping current behavior. If employees resist a change, avoid assuming they merely need more instructions. They may believe the initiative will disappear, that speaking honestly is dangerous, or that leaders are exempt from the sacrifices expected of everyone else.
Then consider what experience would credibly challenge that belief. The answer might involve sharing information sooner, removing a status privilege, letting a team design part of the solution, or publicly acknowledging a leadership mistake. The experience must carry enough weight to be interpreted as evidence rather than messaging.
Finally, watch how the organization responds and remain willing to adjust. Surrender replaces the fantasy of a perfectly controlled rollout with a cycle of action, observation, and learning.
The Real Risk—and Opportunity—of Letting Go
This approach can feel dangerous because traditional leadership often equates authority with certainty. Admitting that the answer is incomplete, allowing others to influence the solution, or removing a symbol of status may appear to weaken a leader’s position.
Kriegel’s argument is that the greater weakness lies in protecting the appearance of control after reality has made it impossible. Employees usually encounter the consequences of uncertainty regardless of whether leaders name it. Candor and participation can turn that uncertainty into a shared problem; concealment and rigid control may turn it into distrust.
Surrendered leadership is therefore not leadership with less ambition. It is leadership with a more realistic theory of influence. Leaders cannot manufacture every response, but they can shape the experiences from which beliefs and actions emerge. They cannot command adaptability, but they can build an environment in which adaptation becomes natural.
The counterintuitive secret is that letting go of what cannot be controlled may increase a leader’s impact on what can.
