Surrender to Win: The Contrarian's Guide to Leading in Chaos - Dr Jessica Kriegel

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A surrendered leader follows three main phases in designing their organization to get results, and that is clarity, alignment, and accountability.

First, you create clarity around where you're going, then you get alignment around that with your team, and then you hold everyone accountable. If you do those three things really well,

I appreciate you taking the time to be on the show. I know you're very busy.
You got the book coming up.

We're going to talk about that a little bit, but the time is meaningful and always appreciate someone cutting that out of their day to spend with the audience. Well, right back at you.
Thank you.

You had more work to do than I did for this. You had to prep and read up about me.
I'm just excited to be here. I just lie about doing prep.
I actually just wing it from the rips.

I just, it makes it sound like I'm working harder than I really am. No, no, no.

Well, in the in the green room before

the green room, I say that like it's super official, but before we

went live,

you were talking about uncertainty, and there's so many things that I want to get into, but I feel like this is,

and it's serendipitous coincidence, maybe just we're both brilliant and we're thinking the same way.

But I think this is the biggest issue that we face, not just in business, but in our personal lives as well.

This idea, it feels to me, certainly this is the most uncertain time of my almost 45 years that I've been on the planet.

And, you know, this is, this feels like the most uncertain time that we are facing, right? Thankfully, it seems like

we're not continuing to ratchet up

international violence while it's still happening. It seems not just new war after new war.

Outside of that. It depends on what country you're talking about.
Yeah, it depends on what country. No, I get it.
I get it. And there's plenty of stuff still happening.

But in general, where maybe the previous 10 years, it felt like every other week there was a new conflict that was internationally.

And maybe some of that is repression by the news, et cetera, or even the administration, you know, doing a little posturing. But

every other aspect, and maybe we can include that one as well, is seemingly uncertain. You mentioned K-shape economy.
You mentioned,

you know, what's going on with AI. I think, you know, you're looking at your financial assets, going, where the hell do I put my money? You know, so not just the economy in terms of jobs.

There is absolutely becoming this haves and haves nots. I mean, this is probably the worst have, have, not version of our society again in my in my lifetime.

So when you're looking out over this and being that this is what you think about every day,

where are the most uncertain points?

Like if you had to rank order them and we wouldn't have to go through every single one, but like what sits at the top of that list in terms of maybe fear, anxiety, stress that organizations and individuals, particularly leadership, is feeling when it comes to this uncertainty?

Well, let's frame the conversation first by asking, what is leadership most concerned about?

And we have been told, and it has been hammered into us, that as leaders, our first and foremost goal is to create shareholder value.

So, economic uncertainty is the biggest uncertainty because all of the other ones affect those. The technological uncertainty is a question of economics.
How fast do we need to move into AI?

Are we going to be left behind? Is this going to be good or bad? Are we going to create a more resilient or less resilient organization? And how will that affect the economics of it?

The political uncertainty is also an economic question. We anticipate unemployment going up.
I have a prediction that next year, by the second half of the year, we're going to be at 6% unemployment.

We're already at 6% unemployment for certain groups, marginalized groups, college graduates. So

that is what people are worried about. And I think all of the other fears fall into the category of, and how will that affect us economically? So

how to deal with it is the question on everyone's mind is how do we make good decisions and lead our organization towards a future when we don't know the environment in which that future will operate and we don't even really know what skills we need right now in order to be prepared for that future.

And that's why leadership right now, I think, is having its heyday. Once again, we go through phases.

And I think we are in a phase right now where people are asking themselves, how do I show up as a leader and how do I drive results?

So how does that, how do we start to show up as a leader in these uncertain times? Like what does that actually look like?

Well, let me tell you what you don't do and it's something that we have been doing for a while and it's something we call the action trap.

So the action trap is this endless cycle of activity that feels like progress because we just have to push more and do more.

And what you've seen become really popular in the zeitgeist these days and in the last decade is this idea of manifesting, right? Positive thinking, manifestation.

Joe Dispenza, all I got to do is imagine the future that I want to create and then I can create it. And manifesting is really just

manifesting as doing more. People think that what that looks like is, what do I got to do to get the result that I need? I got to do more.
I'm going to act more. I'm going to get more.

You know, it's just doing more. And then we get into the action trap, which is that hamster wheel of...
It's slow progress, but it is progress. And so it feels like what we need is just more of that.

and

you know so our company has been in business for 35 years and we have something that we think really works we're working with some of the biggest companies in the world and we're offering a solution that sounds totally counterintuitive and it sounds touchy-feely it's one of the greatest challenges that we have is that we're evangelizing something that drives results but it sounds soft and like you know be a good person and everything will work out and what we're evangelizing is surrender as a methodology to drive more results than you ever thought possible.

And a lot of people hate this word. The idea of surrender feels weak, you know, especially military people.

It conjures up images of waving the white flag, like, I give up, it's too much uncertainty, there's too much going on, I surrender.

But what we're suggesting is that, you know, the Navy SEALs have a saying, which is to control the controllables.

There's an unspoken corollary to that phrase that is

assumed in that saying, which is control the controllables and stop trying to control the uncontrollables. And that's

the military's version of the serenity prayer. Exactly.
That's brilliant. Yeah, it is.
And so, you know, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. What can you not change?

You cannot change the rapid pace of development of AI. You cannot change the economic K-shaped economy.
You cannot change the political unrest.

You cannot change how much your employees, Gen Z, millennial, whatever generation they're in, how much they actually want to work for you, how engaged they are, if they give you their discretionary effort or not.

You can't control what they do even.

So what can you control? Right. The second half of the serenity prayer, except the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things I can.

And the things that I can change are myself and the way that I show up and respond. And the wisdom to know the difference is seeing where you as a leader stop and where everyone else begins.

And where you as a leader stop is at you.

And because we've been given the title of chief or of vice president or of manager or director or whatever other word that sends us subliminal messages that our job is to tell people what to do and to make them do those things and hold them accountable to it.

We fall into the trap of just bossing people around, trying to get them on board with your ideas and expecting that to drive results. And we get in that action trap.
So surrender is,

we have a different framework. And the framework of surrender is get out of the action trap and ask yourself the question, what motivates people to take action?

We're all people with free will on this planet, including all your employees. No matter how much bigger your paycheck is at the end of the month, they have free will.

And you telling them to do something isn't going to work. If it was that easy, we wouldn't have all these leadership books being written, right?

So what gets them to take action, it is the underlying beliefs that they hold about the company, about you, about the product, right?

So leaders lean into systems, procedures, and policies to change behavior, but people will act in alignment with what they believe.

And so if you want them to do something differently, you have to shift their beliefs. And once again, I can't just tell you to change your belief, right?

I can't say, okay, Ryan, now you're going to be really comfortable with risk-taking. Go.
We're now a culture of performance.

I mean, you see these CEOs who go on to town halls and declare culture like a motivational speech is going to do it. We're now an accountable culture.
We're now innovative culture, whatever.

It's what all leaders can control is the experiences that they are creating for people. And culture isn't created in one big experience like a town hall speech.

It's created in thousands of daily experiences that people have with you as the leader, with each other, with the systems.

And so to surrender to lead is to focus on the experiences you're creating, which will shape people's beliefs that will ultimately get them to opt in to take action that will help get you the result.

So we always start with what result are you trying to create? And then we reverse engineer the question to say, now what beliefs are getting in the way of you achieving those results?

And what beliefs do you want people to have? that will help you achieve those results. So just to give a quick example, I know I've been talking for a long time now, but quick example is with AI.

So you have a bunch of companies running to AI blindly.

A lot of these companies are running towards it just because they see everyone else running and they've started running as well without totally understanding if it's going to benefit them or how it's going to benefit them.

And there's pressure on their employees to now implement AI. And most of it is like the wild, wild west out there.
CEOs are saying, Go figure out how AI can be more helpful to you.

And they're waiting for someone to come and bring them something revelatory about how they're going to drive efficiency. And people's beliefs about AI are: this is going to replace me.

This is going to make me less secure, me less economically viable.

I don't know about you, but when I'm using AI for my business, I don't need it to tell me what to do. I know what I want.
I just need help making it happen.

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Less of a provider for my family, and yet I have pressure to create it. And so there is resistance.

CEOs are being met with resistance internally to the adoption of AI because it's not a technology problem, it's a belief problem.

So what experiences can you create to shift those beliefs? That's the level that we're operating at, and it is actually unlocking potential.

And we've studied the potential this unlocks, and it's 4x the amount of growth if you come from this leadership mindset.

So, first, you're the guest, so you can talk as long as you want. Okay, thank you.

Second,

everything you just said sounds really hard. It's like way easier if I just pay them money and tell them what to do, and then yell at them if they don't do it.
So,

how do you start to crack into, like, to me,

having been both the boss and worked for for many bosses, right? There is this,

you come across people,

if I'm a, if I'm a top down, do as I say, I pay you money, since I pay you money and you have decided to work here, you just need to do everything I do without questioning it.

Like that's a real mentality. I've come across it many times.
I'm sure you have as well. It's probably

depending on, depending on

work experience and age, it probably is more likely the way that they try to operate unless they've run into something really negative.

How do you, can you crack that person open and get them that type of leader? Can you get them to change?

Or if you're listening to this and you're sitting on a board or you're part of a C-suite, you know, are you just looking at your CEO or whoever the leader is in that position and saying, we're going to have to go a different direction?

Like, can you get someone out of that mindset? towards this idea of surrender, which I love and agree with 100%. Is it

organizational survival? Do you have to replace that person? Yeah, great question. There's a phrase that I heard from a brilliant CEO once, which was, change the people or change the people.

Those are your two choices. And so the question is, when do you change the people and when do you change the people? You can crack people open and we have cracked people open.
And here's how.

We eat our own dog food. So what we're talking about is a belief.

Leaders have the beliefs that they should be obeyed and listened to and that they have the answers and that people are being paid to follow instructions.

And frankly, it's not as simple as labeling those kind of leaders, which we'll quote, call bad leaders, and then good leaders. I mean, every leader has a little bit of that in them.

I have a little bit of that in them, right? Sometimes I tell someone to do something and I really expect that they're going to do it. And when they don't, I'm like, what the hell, dude?

I just told you to do that. That shows up in moments of frustration and moments of stress.
It shows up a little bit for every leader at some level. So

let's say you've got a lot of that in you and you're a skeptic and you're sitting on a board or you're an investor and you're all about execution and driving results and you think I'm talking about a bunch of touchy-feely stuff.

Well, I need to shift your belief. So what experience can I create that will help shift that belief? That's the question to ask.

There are three powerful experiences that are good places to start when you're trying to change someone's deeply held beliefs. First is recognition.
The second is feedback.

And the third and most powerful is storytelling. So we start with storytelling.
I mean, my job is to evangelize and to tell stories. I'm a keynote speaker.
I'm a podcaster.

I go on the news and I'm constantly telling stories about the power of surrender because I'm hoping that the story will be an experience that will shift the belief for a leader who can then take action.

So what does it look like? Here's a story that we tell a lot because it's... It's a good story.
It's a well-known organization and it demonstrates the power of driving results.

And that's where we have to always remember we begin and end with driving results because this isn't just about creating engaging I hate the this HR leaders who say we want to create an engaged workforce because if people aren't engaged they'll leave and turnover is expensive That is so not true anymore.

People love turnover. I have worked with the CEOs of the Fortune 100 and they love turnover because it brings in fresh meat.
We're trying to be more efficient.

They're not having to do the layoffs that they were planning on doing anyway. So let's assume that turnover doesn't cost you anything.
In fact, it makes you more efficient.

Now, what's the argument for engagement other than being a good person?

Being a good person is really great if you're on a spiritual journey, which a lot of leaders are, but for many leaders, they're on a shareholder value creation journey.

And so engagement is not in their purview. So let's just talk numbers and sense.

We're working with a medical center in Boston, and they had hired us because in healthcare, there's often this tension between data entry and patient experience, right?

Especially with the regulatory environment in the U.S.

So the head of the emergency department hired us because she could not get her employees to fill out the paperwork that needed to be filled out when patients would come in.

So we said, give us an example. What's one piece of paperwork that isn't getting filled out?

Next of kin forms were being filled out 42% of the time for incoming patients at this medical center in Boston. So we asked her what she had tried, and she was in the action trap.

This is what the the action trap looks like. She did a bunch of training on the form,

incentivized people that if they filled out the form at a higher rate, they would have a pizza party to celebrate. She simplified the form.
She translated the form.

She had some difficult conversations with people who were not filling out the form to understand why they didn't want to fill out the form. I mean, she did meetings and dashboards and KPIs.

And six months later, and all that time and effort spent, she moved the needle 47%.

She moved it to 47%, which means she moved the needle 5%.

And that's the action trap. And it feels like progress.
She did get the number to be better. So it feels like I just got to do more of that, right?

Maybe I got to improve our orientation plan for new hires. Maybe I need to have ongoing training or whatever.

We came in and we said, what are the beliefs getting in the way of your employees filling out that form?

And the belief was that the form was a complete waste of their time. I mean, they're trying to create positive patient experience.
They got people coming in with gunshot wounds. Boston is a big city.

Really critical injuries are coming into the ER, and people just didn't have time to fill out the form. So we helped her identify two stories that she could tell, true stories.

And she started telling these two stories. She told them for three weeks.
The first story was a woman who came into the emergency department. They did not gather her next of kin information.

She fell unconscious. And they tried to save her, and ultimately she died.
Second story, same hospital, different time. An older gentleman comes comes in.
They do gather his next of kin information.

He falls unconscious. They call

the daughter. The daughter says he's on this medication.
This thing happened three weeks ago. The doctors save his life.

She tells those two stories for three weeks. And in three weeks, they were filling up the form 92%

of the time in three weeks. That's the result.
that the leader was trying to achieve that was changed by focusing on beliefs. So I tell those kind of stories.

You know, you get in a boardroom and you tell that story and they start to see, oh, I get it. This is a more effective way to drive results.
We studied this with Stanford Graduate Business School.

We looked at 243 companies. Control-based cultures were outperformed by cultures that had this belief mentality that were able to adapt by four times.

So if you want to create four times revenue, that's the story you tell to the executive who's got that hardened heart that thinks this is touchy-feely. And you say, well, what if it drove results?

And then, you know, what happens is someone takes a chance on it at the workplace, they see the results that it drives, and then it starts to spread like wild.

Why is this seen as more of a storytelling? Why is storytelling seen more as a superpower than just the norm for the position?

I mean, I think a lot of people lean into data these days because it feels hard. It's like quantitative versus qualitative.
Qualitative is soft, and quantitative is hard, and you can't deny the facts.

But the problem with with data is what I have seen is oftentimes data-driven decision making is

fake.

I don't know a better word for it than fake because leaders already have in mind what they want to do and they're looking for data to justify their decision so that if it goes wrong they can point to the data as the reason why they made that choice and preserve their job security and success.

So I think data collection is more powerful with storytelling, but it is more, storytelling is more powerful than data collection because of the way that it can be manipulated.

I mean, everything can be manipulated, but storytelling moves us at a visceral level. It's why Hollywood is so popular, because we are story listeners.

So is it fair to say that by prioritizing data-driven narrative versus a storytelling narrative, if we're just to bifurcate those two?

The data-driven narrative from a leadership perspective is almost more of a self-preservation tactic because you tell a great story and it hits. You look like a superhero.

You look like the hero of the company. You tell a great story and it doesn't hit.
And now everyone's pointing at you and saying, this is the reason why we're not winning.

However, if you're telling a narrative just based on data that you can then hold up in front of the board, as you said, it's like, look, I made this decision based on this. It's not my fault.
It's

the data's fault, right? I can now, I now have an excuse. Is it, is it

human psychology, you know, behavior-oriented? Is it that? Is it really that kind of,

what's the right word? Like, is it that tied to our human nature and the idea of just preserving our place and our job?

Or is it that the type of person that ascends to a leadership position, while we see exceptions to that and we kind of hold them up,

most of the time that individual is just not a natural storyteller?

Yeah, I mean, let's talk about all of the great leaders that books have been written about in the past. They all had one thing in common.
Only one thing.

And that was that they got results.

They don't write books about leaders that didn't get a result. If you didn't get a result and you were a failed leader, no one's writing about you.

Then once you just qualify, the leaders that are written about are the ones that get results, then there's a thousand different types of leaders in that category. There's the humble leader and the

tyrant leader, and all of them are in the same bucket of great leaders, according to someone. So there's there's a lot of bias about what makes a great leader.

And I could go on one podcast and they will be all about people first and authentic self and DEI.

And then I go on another podcast and they're all about execution discipline, no whiners, and you know, don't be an asshole.

And those are two totally different, but very effective leaders in their own right. I think storytelling allows us to find the leader that we resonate the most with.

It's the thing that shapes beliefs.

And especially in today's age with fake news, data doesn't convince anyone of very much anymore because I can always be skeptical of the data but when I feel something in my soul from a storytelling perspective then I'm bought in right and that's what you what really leaders want to unlock is accountability and accountability is the thing that you cannot force down anyone's throat as a leader I can make you responsible for something, right?

We all go to our executive off-site retreat. We decide that we're going to implement a new initiative and the sales team is going to be responsible for implementing it.

The sales team was asleep while this whole meeting happened, but they were made responsible for a project.

I then cannot come home from that leadership retreat and say, now, salespeople, I need you to take accountability. They have to choose to take accountability.
They have to opt into that.

And so, that's the free will thing we were talking about.

They have to believe that this is important to them, either from a place of fear, I don't want to lose my job, I don't want to get in trouble, or from a place of buy-in, I want to do this.

Both will be effective in their own way, right? I think that it's less effective these days,

the tyrant leader who is the fear-based leader is less effective these days because people are becoming more and more disillusioned with the K-shaped economy, the wealth inequality gap that you talked about at the beginning of this podcast is worse than it's ever been.

People are more and more cynical about leadership and they don't trust that leaders have their best interests at heart. And so here's a great great example.

We were working with a professional services firm and they had a vision to create $100 million in revenue in three years.

So that was the big vision that they had plastered on the walls that they were talking about at the town halls. We're going to achieve $100 million.

And when we started working with the company to figure out like what are the beliefs that people have, nobody gave a shit about $100 million.

It was a private equity-backed firm. That $100 million was not going to go into the pockets of the employees.
It was like, oh, I really care about creating $100 million

for that PE, our PE overlords.

Like it just didn't move the needle for anyone on the company, but the leaders felt the pressure because they're the ones talking to the PE firms and they're the ones whose careers are staked on whether or not they can drive growth quickly.

So we helped them think about, okay, what is the professional services that you're offering and how does it do good in the world? And does it positively impact people?

and it did and so we said what how many people will be impacted if you hit that hundred million dollar mark and the answer was five million and we said okay great how about a vision of impacting five million lives by 2025 it equates to the same financial gain you've done your pricing calculator to figure out how many clients you'll have and how many people that is and what the revenue is but you phrase it in that storytelling way instead of a data way and now people are like, yeah, I'm being a part of this mission to impact 5 million lives.

I care about that. I didn't care about $100 million in revenue.
Yeah.

I had a mentor one time who was talking about mission statements and this kind of stuff. And he said,

picture.

You know,

a boots on the ground employee, a grunt employee, picture them at a cocktail party explaining what you do.

How excited are they going to be to to stand at a cocktail party and go, well, we're going to drive $100 million in revenue for our PE company this year versus we're going to, you know, help 5 million people eat better or whatever the, whatever the thing was, the goal was, right?

Like,

one, they're standing there, you know, clinking their glass going, we're going to help 5 million people.

And they feel great about it and probably their shoulders roll back and they can talk about the mission and how they play a role.

And the other ones is, yeah, we're just making a bunch of money for guys that are already rich and don't give two shits about us.

yeah those guys that take the private jets those we're trying to create wealth for them feel free yeah we want to maximize their roi on their investment of us you know and again like you said like that's a business reality to the fact that they gave they gave money whether it was either startup capital fuel whatever where they were in the cycle and you do need to return you know you do need to to produce an roi for that investment to them as part of the place that they play but that doesn't mean it has to be how you how you tell your story and what you tell your people um you know this Yeah.

And let me just add one thing about what you just said, the business reality. And another business reality is that it is in everyone's best interest to pretend like they're on board with $100 million.

They want you to like them. They want to keep their job.
They don't want to be seen as the squeaky wheel.

They don't want to be labeled the absolute worst thing you could be labeled in capitalism, which is a change resistant. How many times have you wished you could be in two places at once?

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Right? So they're on board with whatever you have. And oftentimes, leaders confuse compliance with alignment.
What they have is a bunch of compliance.

and they think because they're a nice guy, and they say hi in the water cooler chat. Like, are there any water coolers anymore? Why do we still say the word water cooler?

But anyway, they think that because they're a nice guy, they're getting the whole truth. And that is the delusion of leadership: any leader is getting the whole story from their employees.

They are literally depending on you to keep them safe and to allow them to continue to earn revenue in an economy with more and more layoff stories than ever before.

Layoffs are now positive in the the marketplace. Companies are doing them as a badge of honor for creating efficiency.
And everyone is seeing, am I next? When am I going to be? Am I ready?

And so, yeah, I'm on board, whatever you need, boss. And then they go home and complain about you to the wife.

You know, that's the delusion of leadership that you think that you get the truth is really, you know,

it's silly. Yeah, I completely agree.
You had this quote that I was reading. You said,

you know, my sobriety taught me that surrender isn't giving up. It's letting go of the delusion of control.
And I thought that that's so dialed in terms of exactly what we're talking about. Yeah.

You know, having,

you know, having been and run and sold my own company, you know, we, I mean, it was never, we're never hundreds of thousands. We, we topped, I think, at 27 employees, but

not that managing 27 employees is easy.

But this idea of you just have to, you, you have to, this is how I explain it. So I work with a lot of, I know we don't know each other that well.
I work with a lot of founders early stage.

I talk about launch to escape velocity. Once you had escape velocity, go find someone else.
Not that I can't play in that world, but that's just not where my expertise is.

I'm much more of, we'll call it a wartime general than a peacetime general. If you're, if you're discussing DEI initiatives, it's time for me to back out.

Not that they're not important, but that's just not my specialty, nor do I have an opinion on them. So,

and my point in saying all that is, you know, a lot of

leaders claim the title of CEO or president or founder, or whatever they want to call themselves, right? And the conversation that I'll have with these individuals is

being, we'll just call it the CEO, is a job, not a title. And I think too often we get this confused.
And the defining characteristic between them is the title is,

I sit on this throne, like you said, and I point down at the things that are broken and tell you what to fix and where to go and take this hill and, you know, go take taxes from those people.

And it's all this pointing when the job is actually the opposite you know and i talk about spinning the triangle right so from a responsibility standpoint um you know the ceo sits at the top of the responsibility higher the buck stops with him or her but from a support standpoint we have to flip it upside down the ceo sits at the bottom of the support structure and must be that individual who is providing air cover or i just had a a great guest on the show a couple weeks ago selena um resvani she calls it the the shit umbrella.

They have to be a shit umbrella, right? They got to put the umbrella up to

cascade all this away from their team and provide them with the air cover to actually go out and get it. And to your point about the loyalty issue,

it's not Gen Z or millennials or Zennials or whoever that broke the loyalty agreement with corporations. Corporations broke the loyalty agreement with employees.

When they wonder why they job hop every two or three years, and I get this,

my home industry is the property casualty insurance industry. That's where most most of my business has been done throughout my career.

And, you know, there's always this conversation, so hard to find good talent. And people come in and they bounce after two years.
And I'm like, it's 2025 and you still have paper filing cabinets.

Do you think that 23-year-old is excited to come work for your business? Yeah. What are you...

Like, what is the, you know, and then, and then you're constantly pressing on them and you've put all the obligation for their success on them and you have no mentorship program, no apprenticeship program, no, you know, you're not sending them out to get the proper training.

And then you expect them to be loyal. What? Because you pay them a commission split on a sale?

Like, I don't understand what's the value proposition that you're providing them that they would be loyal, right?

Because corporations broke it, at least from my perspective. And the response- From a historical perspective, that's correct.

Yeah, but, but that's not the narrative that you get from so many people, especially people who haven't spent time dissecting this. It's always,

you know, Gen Z or not Gen. Yeah, Gen Z or millennials, you know, and look, I think millennials are are more difficult to deal with than Gen Z personally, but like,

that's probably more of a personality issue than it is. What are you? What? What are you? I'm whatever that one is between X.

I'm a Zennial 81, I guess. The greatest generation.
I think they call it the greatest generation. Nope, that's not you.
That's the old people.

But okay, you're pretty much a millennial. I mean, all of these labels, I wrote a book about this, by the way.
My opinion on generational dynamics is that it's mostly a bunch of bullshit.

I completely agree. Everyone's agree.
Yeah. But having said that,

employee expectations are changing. That's what is a trend that we can identify, right? So I think you're right.
Go ahead, keep going. I cut you off.

You know, I just, and my, my, my kind of taking this first half of our conversation and putting it in a nutshell is like,

I feel like so many leaders want to just offboard this idea of loyalty and just expectation because they get a paycheck.

And everything that you've talked about so far is, is there must be this narrative based in story that inspires people beyond just the money that you give them, or at least most of the people are going to want some sort of narrative beyond the money that you give them in order to

work the later nights or push when you need it, right? And

if you don't do that groundwork, when the time actually comes when you need to go to your team and say, look, we need two weeks of killing ourselves. Like we just have, we got to go get this.

And whether they come along for the ride is going to be all of this that you have talked about in the first 30 minutes of of our conversation. This is what's going to, when you need it, right?

But if you wait until that moment, and this is where I see so many people get in trouble, is they wait until they ask for it and it's not there. And then they start going, well, what's wrong?

I mean, she's worked here for five years or he's been, you know, whatever.

I just, I guess I'm trying to get out ahead of this to say like, this can't, we don't want to wait until there's a problem to start crafting these narratives and telling these stories and bringing people along.

It's that groundwork needs to to be laid yesterday so that when you do have a problem or there is a time when you need to push hard, that those people are going to come along for that ride unquestionably.

Does that make sense when Fantas say that? Totally. And you're describing something.

We've done research on the tenure curve, which is when on average, we looked at 50,000 frontline workers to understand how bought in they are to a company.

And the peak of their buy-in is on day one of the job because they've just accepted your offer to come work there. They obviously thought it was a deal worth taking.

And so you have also buttered them up with a bunch of stories in the interview process, in the application process, in the offer process, where you're talking about how great it is to work here, all the interesting projects they're going to be involved in, what the colleagues are like, how wonderful the growth expectations are.

So they're operating, I think the number was like 72, somewhere 70, it's 70 something was their engagement level on day one.

And within one month, it drops to 50 something, something, another month it drops to 40, and by month three it's at 30 something percent.

Because in those three months they're now having a bunch of real experiences with the paper filing cabinets, with the expectations being too high, with the lack of

interest in your personal life or in your work-life balance or whatever. And now they realize that the story you told them wasn't true.

And so it's the lived experiences that will shape the beliefs about whether or not they're willing to, we call it at our company, move with pace.

You know, when we need to like sprint together for those short sprints, we are able to say, we're in a sprint right now. We need to double down.

And then when, and then we, and then literally just a couple weeks ago, our CEO told everyone, we're stopping our sprint now, everyone. Thank you for sprinting.
Take a moment.

Just chill because he knows also when to give them permission to let off the gas, which is a really important experience too. So I totally agree.

It's in the lived experiences that are happening along the way.

And here's the underlying dynamic that leaders are fighting within themselves that puts them in the category you talked about where they're waiting until we're in a crisis to lean on their people.

It's ego.

I mean, as you grow your business, your own personal title, whatever it is, if you're a founder and you are the co-founder and CEO of blah, blah, blah, and you've raised all this money and you've gotten their team to be a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger, there is the part of us, and this is natural, that feels good about ourselves, feels a little bit prideful about, you know, I did this, I built this, I'm a good leader, I'm doing good, I'm gonna kick ass.

And then that ego is where a lot of the decisions that you make and how you show up every day come from, the entitlement.

I mean, how many CEOs have I had email me, can you please convert this PowerPoint to a PDF? Why did that CEO not do it?

Not because they didn't know how, but because they didn't think they needed to, right? I mean, it's that entitlement that creates the experiences.

So the leader's job is to fight the ego, not just so that you're not an asshole, but because it creates space and room for the people on your team to actually want to lean in and offer that discretionary effort.

It will be beneficial to you, but you're either operating from fear and scarcity and ego, or you're operating from love and abundance and an open mindset.

And I know love and abundance sounds touchy-feely, but those are the leaders that are able to empower their team to drive those extraordinary results beyond what they could have just done, micromanaging everyone on their own.

Yeah. And if you can't handle that because it's touchy-feely, you're, you're just less of a leader.
I mean, guys,

you are the ego leader. Yeah, just so guys, so you're listening at home.

Like, you know, I know people who I can't have some of these conversations with in business because they would hear something like surrender or love or, you know, what, and they're like,

you know, we just need to put numbers on the board. Right.

And it's like okay i get it like in some circle in some private club when you sit down and you're who are umph and whatever you know whatever it is that sounds really good in your peer group right that that phrase you've developed that mentality in that phrase because in some peer group that gains you status having that mentality but I can tell you, having done, you know, done this for 20 years in conjunction, you know, just piggybacking of what you just said, if you are unwilling to embrace these more ethereal topics, you are less of a leader.

You will have more problems. There will be, there may be plenty of things you can get past, but there will be obstacles, hurdles, pitfalls, et cetera, challenges that come up in your business.

And because you haven't addressed these parts, you are going to get blistered. And it will be no one's fault other than yours.
It's not your people's fault. It's not your manager's fault.

It's not your board's fault. It's your fault because you were too,

you know, whatever nonsensical, you know, thing you want to put on it. You were too ego-driven.
You're too

outcome.

I heard one guy go, you know,

all that matters is outcomes. Well, yeah, no, yes, outcomes matter.
Got to pay the bills, got to make sure the shareholders are taken care of, got to make sure we can pay our people for sure, right?

But how you get to those outcomes matters. How you get to the outcome matters.
You can, you can kind of data,

you can let data drive your decisions and you can let your gut or your ego drive decisions and have some success for sure. It's happened.

But you are absolutely clearing blind spots in your business if you are people do not believe in the story behind what you're trying to do. You just, you are, they're blind spots.

So, what I've never understood, but maybe for a whole bunch of reasons, I just don't have this type of ego. I'm sure I have many other types of ego, but I just don't have this one.

It's like, why would you not, why would you want to have blind spots in your business, right? Like, if you're sitting at home and you're listening to this and you're thinking this is too ethereal,

why would you, like, what is the holdup for someone? Like, I guess this is where I'm trying to get to.

How do you take someone who doesn't immediately gravitate to the idea of surrender and get them to buy into this concept if they are that ego-driven person?

Storytelling. I keep telling them stories about how it works and the potential that it unlocked.
I'll give you another story.

I was at Oracle for 10 years and then I left and became the CHRO of a technology company. And I, so I went, you mentioned my sobriety.
I am five years sober in

nine days. And

I had a moment of surrender in my personal life because I was an alcoholic. And I mean, I am a recovered alcoholic.
And so I had to surrender.

And it completely transformed my way of thinking and acting in my day-to-day life. And then literally two months later, I get hired as the CHRO of this technology company.
And I'm so excited.

And I get there and it's a fast growing startup. We have our very first board board meeting the first week that I'm on the job.

We go into the board and the board lets us know that I need to lay off 20% of the workforce and I'm in charge.

And so I had just had this moment of transformation, this moment of surrender. I'm embracing a new lifestyle of, you know, living with integrity, surrendering my life to a higher power.

And now I have to do layoffs. And it wasn't, I didn't want to do them.
You know, I mean, I was not interested as the new kid on the block to be the face of layoffs.

No one likes doing layoffs, okay? But they are a business imperative at some points in your evolution. And I had to surrender to the fact that the layoffs were happening.

And it was going to be a career-limiting move for me to argue with the board or try and reverse their decision or whatever.

I mean, we had just signed some Class A office face in the Bay Area that was right before COVID. And then everyone was working from home.

We were just, the company was financially in a really bad spot.

So I asked myself what surrender would look like in that scenario. And here's what layoffs typically look like.
Okay. The executives know that it's happening months before the rest of the company.

And they go in a room and they control the process. They control the narrative.
They figure out how many people do we have to lay off. How will that impact the budget?

When are we going to tell people? Who is it going to be? How are we going to manage the fallout? And then one day they finally drop the axe.

And then they lay everyone off and they deal with the reaction to the news. And eventually, slowly, people forget and they recover.
And then we do it all over again, right?

So I didn't want to do that because that was controlling the narrative. That was the opposite of surrender.

So I went back to my office the day of the board meeting and I called everyone into a meeting and I told them the truth.

I said, I've just been informed by the board that we have to lay off 20% of the workforce and I don't know who and I don't know when and I don't know how exactly, but I'll keep you up to date as we move through the process.

Okay, so that doesn't get done. I mean, that's just not something that happens anymore.
And the reason is because leaders are afraid that they'll lose the wrong people.

They want to control who leaves and who doesn't leave. They don't want to lose top talent.
They only want to lose the underperformers.

And they think that's going to be a better experience for everyone. But here's what happened at this company.

A, first of all, that was a really powerful experience for people because it was completely unusual.

And it drove the belief in them that they were actually working with a different type of executive team that was willing to tell them the truth and be transparent, even if it was really bad, difficult news.

For some people, that also drove the belief, I got to get out of here. And they started looking for jobs and applying for jobs and then getting those jobs and quitting.

And then as the months drove by, you know what we found out? We did not have to do any layoffs because the company right-sized itself. People who left, they left on their own terms.

Enough of them left that we didn't have to do layoffs. We didn't have to pay severance.
It was actually better for the shareholders. And we also hadn't overhired and hired a bunch of poor performers.

So the people that we were left with was this great team of super bought in people that knew we had their backs because we told them the truth, knew we'd give them runway if we got into further financial crisis.

And they were all in. That's surrender and leadership.
That doesn't happen because... That's just not the way we do things around here, which is, you know, how people often describe culture.

But the way I define culture is how do people think and act? How do you want your team to think and act?

If that's not valuable to you and you think culture is like ping pong tables and pizza parties, then you should think twice about that, you know, in my opinion. Yeah, one, I love that story.

And the thing that

the thing that storytelling does is it creates a natural filter. It creates a natural filter for prospects.
It creates a natural filter for employees, for peers, for whoever, investors, right?

If you're, you know, why, why does everybody who consults on investment decks talk about narrative driven, you know, narrative-driven stories, story stories, right? It's not about the data.

Don't have 500 charts. Have a story that someone can believe and get behind and their wallet will open.

It's because the story is going to repel the people you don't want or that don't align with that story if it's honest. And it's going to attract the people that are.
And it's that simple. And

to me, I just, you know, I don't want to keep coming back to this idea, but I, it.

It bewilders me that there are people who do not prioritize storytelling in their business and all these capacities. And oftentimes you'll even see people who will

stand out in front of their sales team and talk story, story, story about selling. And then, but, but, but internally, it's just do what I say, you know, whatever.

And it's that disconnect is, is, is so incredibly interesting. I want, I want to pivot for like the last part of our conversation here.

Um, you posted something on LinkedIn that I thought was really interesting around

this, I'll call it a prediction that you had where there would be the first AI CEO in 2026. And then you used Zoom CEO working, using an avatar to deliver quarterly results.

And Sherm CEO has an AI clone that they use to

bounce ideas off of. Maybe you can go in a little more detail, but I'd love for you to talk through this because that idea, I think, for most people seems maybe bananas at this point, really early.

I tend to agree with you. Like gun to my head, I think there's a better chance that there is an AI running a company in 2026 than there isn't.

It's probably close to 50-50 in my mind, but it's certainly not zero. And so I'm really interested in why you made this prediction and maybe talk us through the idea.

Yeah, I mean, the writing's on the wall. AI is replacing people.
Why can't it replace CEOs? What does a CEO do that an intern isn't doing? It's problem solving. It's making decisions.

It's, you know, there is nothing that a CEO does that an AI clone couldn't do.

And I think the reason that it is more likely than 50% going to happen, because I think some AI disruptor startup is going to do it for media, right?

I mean, it's going to be a splashy press story, and the first person who's willing to do it is going to get that earned media. And so

it's a no-brainer if you're in the AI space, in my opinion. I also think there's a chance that Benioff does it.

I mean, he puts himself into some chairman position and declares AI as the CEO of Salesforce. And think of the impact that that would have on the business.

He's terribly worried about getting left behind. He can, you know, it will be probably largely for show, whoever does it first, but it's going to plant a seed in the minds of people.

And I think it could actually be good for business generally, because there's a lot of things that CEOs do that are counterproductive to an organization.

For example, we talked earlier about don't believe that you're getting the whole truth from your team. They're trying to make you like them.

They're playing a political game with you to be on your good side in order to self-preserve within your organization. People would have less of that with an AI CEO, right?

Because the AI CEO wouldn't necessarily have that political incentive to quiet or get rid of people who disagree with me. It's a lot easier to give feedback to an AI CEO.

It's a lot easier to get access to an AI CEO. I mean, I think it could potentially be a good move for an organization to do it.
The naysayers say they'll never be able to prevent,

you know, they'll never be able to do the human-centered part of leadership, the love and the empathy part, but there are a lot of CEOs who are not doing that right now.

So I don't know why we need that. I'm not saying that it's, I have not made a declaration about if I think AI CEOs will outperform regular CEOs or not.
I don't know.

I'm just saying I think we're going to start playing with that idea next year.

Yeah, I see,

to me,

what in my mind, what's an absolute guarantee is

like the situation that you addressed with Sherm CEO. Every CEO should have an AI clone because

there is a certain level of transactional question or SOP related item, et cetera, that

all those types of tasks, all those types of interactions could be completely taken off that individual's plate to allow them to hopefully or potentially

focus on more of the cultural stuff,

focus on storytelling.

I mean, you know, when you, I mean, I'm sure one of the excuses that you get, I know it's certainly one of the ones that I get from early stages, I'm just too busy to do that stuff.

Ryan, I'm too busy. I have too much going on.
You don't understand. You don't understand, right?

Well, if all those transactional items were taken off their plate because it could be handled by a clone or a series of clones, right?

You could even create specific clones for specific departments that really specialize and can get, you know, smarter, quicker, et cetera, on certain departments, whether it's related to branding or

board-related, et cetera. If you could carve off some of these transactional tasks, it should, in theory, free that CEO up to do more of the ethereal items that actually move the needle long term.

So that to me seems like a foregone conclusion.

It's already happening, right? Yeah. I mean, the AI Zoom avatar delivering the C Zoom CEO avatar delivering at the investor call the quarterly earnings report.

That is a transactional task that they've offloaded, right? So that's already happening. I do think there's going to be a challenge with that.
The reason it was easy to clone Johnny C.

Taylor Jr., who's the CEO of Sherm, is because he's a thought leader and he has a lot of articles that he's written and speeches that he's given. And he's

got content that informs this clone about what his beliefs are and what decisions he would make or what questions he would have.

A lot of CEOs don't have the amount of data that is required to train the AI clone to be similar to the CEO. And so that I think will be a barrier.

You'll have to start with these kind of CEO slash thought leaders. That's a good consulting engagement.
Just add that as a tagline, right?

You just interview people for a series of hours, gather all their thoughts on different topics, and then you can create create it. I mean, I think

I agree with you. It'll be the, it'll be the content creators that, that probably deploy these first, but

that barrier is relatively small because with, you know, transcription services and, you know, if you did proper questioning, hey, I'm going to give you this example. Tell me how you'd handle it.

You could gather that information pretty quick. So anyone out there who's especially if you're like recording your Zoom calls, right? Yeah, although

you probably don't,

from some of the scandals that we see, maybe you don't want to use the transcripts from Zoom calls.

Well,

I think,

this has been phenomenal. I mean, I could go all day with you on this stuff.
I really like this idea of the action trap that you've discussed and that you address in the book, et cetera, because

this to me feels like the easiest.

The easiest layer to peel off to start to get to this, right? Doing transactional, non-valuable work, work that you shouldn't be doing, distractions, et cetera. I mean,

our focus is, you know, today in this highly distracted world, right? Our focus and where we spend our time is so incredibly valuable.

And if we can get out of this idea of the action trap, it seems like it just unlocks everything that you're teaching and surrender to lead. And I couldn't agree with your philosophy more.

Without having the words or ever using the term surrender, it's definitely, it's my leadership style 100%, probably too much because I don't really like working that hard.

So I just like empowering all my people to do their thing.

But no, this is great. So where, if people want to get deeper into your world, what's the best place to do that?

Great question. So if you want to know how much of a surrendered leader you are, we have a surrendered leader assessment.

If you pre-order the book, you'll get $300 worth of toolkits for free that we'll send you. So you can go to surrendertolead.com to get the book and then get all of those toolkits.

There's one tool I'll give you guys for free if you're listening. It's the results equation builder.
We didn't really talk on this, but

a surrendered leader follows three main phases in

designing their organization to get results, and that is clarity, alignment, and accountability.

First, you create clarity around where you're going, then you get alignment around that with your team, and then you hold everyone accountable.

And if you do those three things really well, which this book walks you through the process of those three things,

then you can really drive results. And so, the results equation is the clarity piece.
It's step one: it's how do you get clarity on who you are as an organization, where you're going.

It's a little bit of that mission, vision stuff we talked about, but it's also what are the key results, the strategic drivers, and ultimately the beliefs that people need to hold.

So if you want to create clarity for your team, sounds like you probably have a lot of founders that are listeners, go to builder.surrendertolead.com and there's a workbook there with it.

So it'll give you a bunch of exercises and kind of tell you what to do next.

Guys, and whether you're listening on wherever you listen to the podcast or you're on YouTube, et cetera, just scroll down in the description.

I'll have links to all of this so you can quickly jump over and get these resources. I highly recommend you do.
And a tremendous follow on LinkedIn as well. I'm going to have your LinkedIn hooked up.

Great follow on LinkedIn. I love the way you approach stuff, all the video work you do there.
So I just appreciate you taking the time again, Jessica. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Ryan.

It was a pleasure having the chat with you.

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