Dr. Jay Conger is a professor at the McKenna School of Business at Claremont McKenna College and one of the world’s leading researchers on leadership, influence, and persuasion. He explains why compliance can cost leaders their best people, how one unscripted moment can build or destroy a reputation, and how to persuade a skeptic with a small pilot.
Leadership lessons from the family dinner table
Jay Conger’s interest in leadership started at home. His father served as deputy chief of protocol at the State Department, hosting visiting dignitaries for the length of their stay, and later became curator of the White House. When Jay was eight, nine, and ten, his father was hosting figures like Queen Elizabeth and Nikita Khrushchev, and he brought their stories home to dinner.
One favorite involved Khrushchev at Disneyland during the Cold War. Jay’s father had been having a hard time breaking through with him, so he arranged an early-morning visit for security reasons and started with the Matterhorn. When the ride ended, Khrushchev pulled him back into the car to go again. They rode it 12 times, and at the end Khrushchev told him, “This is actually better in America.” Stories like this showed Jay what world leaders were like as real people, away from their public roles.
From those dinners, Jay took away two early lessons. Every leader was imperfect, and the imperfections often grew more visible the higher someone rose. There was also no single personality type for leadership: some world leaders were natural extroverts, while others were introverts who had learned to act the part.
Every leader stands in a spotlight
Jay compares the people watching a leader to kids with magnifying glasses. They can use what they see to magnify a leader’s credibility or to burn it. People watch to find out whether they can trust a leader, whether that leader is worth emulating, and what the real priorities are. “In one minute, you can destroy your credibility,” Jay says.
The same spotlight can also work in a leader’s favor. Jay was running an executive program for New York Life when participants arrived from a lunch with the CEO. A server had been bringing milk for his coffee on a tray when he gestured mid-conversation, hit the tray, and spilled the pitcher down his own suit. The CEO stood up and apologized to her, saying he had no idea she was standing there, then dried off his suit and assured her he was fine. The story reached Jay’s program half an hour later, and he bets it traveled through the whole company within two or three days. To Jay, it showed the CEO was humble and grounded.
Know your values before the moment arrives
Leaders can’t predict when they’ll be tested, but they can decide in advance what they want to signal. Jay recommends identifying four or five core values and asking what each one looks like in practice.
A new Clorox CEO showed how this works only a few weeks into the job. After a meeting in Brazil, he was told a car was waiting to take him to lunch while everyone else took a bus. He thanked the person who arranged it, declined the car, and rode the bus with the team. A general manager standing beside him concluded on the spot that the new CEO was a team player.
Persuasion is a campaign, not an event
When Ford asked Jay to teach leadership to its dealers, he first visited a large dealership in Las Vegas to understand what leadership looked like there. The owner described his vision in clear, concrete terms. Before his next interview, Jay asked a janitor whether he knew the dealership’s vision, and the janitor repeated it word for word. To Jay, that showed a leader who had spread his vision so that everyone understood the purpose of their work and felt personally invested in it.
Getting to that point takes persuasion. According to research by McKinsey and Bain, 60 to 70 percent of major change initiatives stall, drag on, or fail. In Jay’s view, the cause is rarely the strategy, the structure, or the process. It’s that leaders never engaged people in a way that was truly persuasive. “This is a campaign. This is not an event,” he says.
The word “dialogue” comes from a Latin word meaning “the truth is among us,” while “monologue” means one person has the truth and hands it to everyone else. Persuasion has been stereotyped as a monologue, but Jay argues that real persuasion is a dialogue, because no one person holds the full picture.
He points to a COO who joined a children’s hospital with a mission to improve patient safety. She knew that telling doctors and nurses they weren’t delivering safe care would get her laughed out of the building. Instead, she spent about a year running small, confidential focus groups about near misses, starting from the premise that most medical errors come from systemic gaps rather than individuals. She framed the effort around the staff’s identity as people who already cared deeply, shared ideas that worked so other teams could try them, and built a coalition at the top that included the head of the nursing union.
Compliance has a cost
Leading by authority and incentives can work in the short term. People worried about their jobs will go along for a while. Over time, though, the best performers start looking for a place that values their voice and contribution, and the people who stay are often the ones with fewer options. Real change requires emotional commitment, and orders don’t produce it. The goal, as Jay puts it, is commitment over compliance.
Let skeptics see it for themselves
To persuade a CEO who relies on command and control, Jay would start by asking whether ordering people around produces results beyond expectations. If the answer is no, he would ask whether the CEO is open to another way. From there, he’d have the CEO run a small, time-bound pilot: meet one-on-one with key people, ask for their view of the problem, and come back with an initiative that reflects their ideas.
Small pilots are one of the credibility boosters Jay writes about. The founders of Rent the Runway had no background in fashion, and designers worried that renting dresses would cannibalize sales. The founders ran pilots at universities to test whether women would rent designer dresses for special events, and an investor who watched them became convinced. They then used the pilot data to show a major designer that younger renters were developing an affinity for her brand, which could grow her market rather than shrink it. People are often more persuaded by what they see and feel than by abstract logic.
Leaders who change their approach should also say so directly. When a senior leader’s behavior shifts quickly, people grow suspicious. Jay advises naming the change openly, explaining that it’s an experiment, and asking the team for their help and the benefit of the doubt.
What to do this week
– Ask yourself whether you’re persuading or just announcing. Before your next launch or kickoff, have three real conversations with people close to the work.
– Know your values before the moment to act on them arrives. Take 10 minutes this week and write down two or three things you refuse to compromise on.
– Let people see it for themselves. If you have a resistant colleague or a skeptical team, don’t argue with them; design a small test, run it, and let them watch what happens.
– Pick one person on your team who needs to hear this conversation, send it to them, and talk it through together.
Related Episodes
– Episode 14 - From Vendor to Trusted Partner: Marco Ziegler on Building Client Trust
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