Control vs Influence: A CEO's 20-Year Lesson

I’ve been a CEO for almost 20 years. And one of the things I didn’t expect to be saying at this point in my career is how much I’ve had to learn about letting go. I’ve always been someone who makes things happen. I became CEO during the financial crisis, in way over my head, and what I learned early is that when I commit fully and work hard, I can drive to an outcome. That belief has shaped most of how I’ve led. It’s also the belief I’ve been examining most closely lately. Because nearly 20 years in, I can also see clearly how much happens outside of my control. I can build a great team, make thoughtful decisions, execute well, and still end up somewhere I didn’t expect. Right now our customers are postponing maintenance because oil prices are high and refineries want to keep producing. That decision has nothing to do with how well we’ve prepared. I’m still accountable for the results. I just didn’t control the conditions. That gap has always existed. I’ve just been getting more honest about it. I’m still ambitious. I’m still building. But my relationship with control is changing, and I’m more comfortable with that than I expected to be. To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerry.siggins/ TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@kerry.siggins

This morning I talked to my mom before I came into the office. Business is hard right now. Our industry is getting hit, we’re making difficult decisions, and I was just telling her how things are. She hugged me and said she didn’t know how I navigate it without falling apart. And I told her: this stuff doesn’t stress me out the way it used to. I’ve been thinking about that conversation all day, because I certainly wasn’t always that way. Ten years ago, I associated stress with caring. If I wasn’t feeling the weight of everything, it meant I wasn’t working hard enough, wasn’t serious enough, wasn’t good enough. I equated intensity with effective leadership. And then someone I trusted told me I could be erratic. I went home and cried. And then I decided to own it. A lot of my urgency had nothing to do with making good decisions. I was trying to stop feeling bad, not actually solve anything. The faster I could fix something, the faster I could move on. And when the people around you are depending on your judgment, that’s a problem worth looking at honestly. This episode is about what I’ve worked on since then. I don’t want to call it a finished transformation, because it isn’t one. I’m still figuring parts of it out. But I’ve been a CEO for almost 20 years, and I think this is some of the most important work I’ve done. To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerry.siggins/ TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@kerry.siggins

I’ve been a CEO for almost 20 years. And for most of that time, I’ve associated doing more with success. More opportunities, more initiatives, more growth. And that belief has driven a lot of what we’ve built. It’s also driven a pattern I haven’t been able to break. Every year we go through strategic planning. We say we need to simplify. We talk about focusing on fewer things. And every year we end up with a plan that’s bigger than we have the capacity to execute. Our people work incredibly hard and still feel like they came up short. I’ve had to own how much of that is on me. This year I had to get honest about what that pattern has actually cost us. People working hard, missing goals, going into the next year and doing it again. I can’t keep telling my team we need fewer priorities and then expect them to figure out what I’m actually willing to cut. Those decisions are mine to make. And I haven’t been making them consistently. I’ve been measuring ambition by how much we’re trying to accomplish rather than by how much we’re actually getting done. And underneath that is a belief I’ve carried my whole career: that doing more is how you achieve more. I’m working on changing that. But I’ve made this commitment before, and the list has always grown back. I know the pattern well enough to describe it in detail. Whether I’ve actually changed it is something I’m going to find out this planning cycle. To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerry.siggins/ TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@kerry.siggins

I became CEO of StoneAge when I was 30. I was ambitious, I was driven, and I was determined to figure things out. And I did. People came to me with problems because they knew I’d engage, and I liked being that person. For a long time, I thought that was just what good leadership looked like. What I didn’t see until much later was what that pattern was doing to the people around me. There’s a real difference between helping someone and doing the work for them. And when you’ve spent years being capable and dependable, when being the person everyone relies on has become part of how you think about yourself, it’s not always easy to tell the difference from the inside. The founders at StoneAge gave me real decision-making authority when I was young and probably not fully ready for it. Some of those decisions weren’t right. That’s also how I learned. I’ve been working out how to do the same for the people I lead now, and it hasn’t been as straightforward as I thought it would be. To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerry.siggins/ TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@kerry.siggins

I've been frustrated a lot lately. Not in a vague, general way. The specific frustration of watching decisions get made far outside my control that land directly on my business, my team, my revenue. What I've noticed is how easy it is to stay in that frustration. To vent about it. To find other people who are just as pissed off and talk about it together. And none of that changes anything. At some point I started asking myself what I actually wanted to do with that energy. And what I found is that I've been taking frustration and building things out of it my whole career. I just hadn't recognized it as a pattern. A fundraising campaign for a softball field that hadn't changed since I played on it in 1997. A book about difficult conversations because I spent years avoiding them and watching other leaders do the same. A reworked company strategy because the plan I built at the start of 2026 no longer matched the world we were actually in. None of those started with a creative impulse. They started with something bothering me. This episode is me working through that pattern out loud, and asking whether you're doing something useful with yours. My new book, Talk With Trust, is now available: https://a.co/d/05mNRnJH To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerry.siggins/ TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@kerry.siggins

I just got back from seven days in the mountains of Southwest Colorado, 200 miles on a mountain bike. 30,000 feet of climbing, no cell service, no email. Just me, the trail, and a lot of time to think. What I didn't expect was how much the ride would change how I see myself as a leader. Not because of some big revelation I planned to have. Because I crashed. Because I had to keep riding anyway. Because on a steep climb at elevation, the only thing that actually works is looking at the two feet of trail in front of you and making the next pedal stroke. Not the summit. Not the miles left. Just the next one. I've spent a long time building toward things. My career, my company, the person I want to become. And this trip made me honest about the cost of that. What happens when you spend so much time creating your future that you don't experience what you've already built. When growth quietly becomes another way of leaving the present. When fixing yourself becomes a habit that carries the message that who you are today still isn't quite enough. I'm done with that. This episode is me working through what presence actually means, not the bumper sticker version, but the version that shows up when you're hurt, scared, 18 miles from the finish, and still have to make a decision about what's actually true right now. My new book, Talk With Trust, is now available: https://a.co/d/05mNRnJH To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerry.siggins/ TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@kerry.siggins

Most leaders have been in one of these moments. You've caught yourself thinking something you'd never say out loud. You've sat across from someone who was crying and had no idea what to do with that. You've kept giving someone more time because you cared about them. You've backed out of a commitment you'd already made, and felt guilty about it even though it was the right call. These aren't the big, dramatic leadership failures. They're the quiet ones. The ones that happen in real time, with real people, when nobody's watching and there's no playbook for what comes next. This compilation pulls together five moments from past episodes that keep coming up in the conversations I'm having with other leaders. My new book, Talk With Trust, is now available: https://a.co/d/05mNRnJH To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerry.siggins/ TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@kerry.siggins

Most leaders have been in this situation. You made your case, you pushed back, and then the decision went another way. Now you've got a team looking at you trying to figure out what you think. What happens next is where it gets hard. When you leave the meeting and find someone who agrees with you. When part of you is quietly hoping the decision fails so you can say you were right. When someone asks you directly and you say “well, I didn't agree with it, but that's what they decided”. That moment is one of the more expensive moves you can make as a leader. This episode is about what you do with a decision once it's been made, and why that part is harder and more important than the debate that came before it. My new book, Talk With Trust, is now available: https://a.co/d/05mNRnJH To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerry.siggins/ TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@kerry.siggins

Most leaders I know have someone on their team right now that they know is not working out. I just went through this. And the reason I recorded this episode is because I think we talk about accountability in the abstract far more than we talk about what it actually feels like to sit with a decision you know you need to make but keep not making. I cared about this person. I believed in them. I kept giving it more time. And while I was doing that, other people on my team were quietly absorbing the consequences — fixing mistakes, picking up work that wasn't theirs, and watching me not deal with something they could all see clearly. That's where this one started for me. Not with a framework for accountability. With the specific discomfort of realizing that my compassion toward one person had a real cost for everyone else, and that I'd been calling it leadership when part of it was just avoidance. The episode works through the questions I ask myself to tell the difference: am I still trying to understand this situation, or am I looking for another reason not to do what I already know needs to happen? Where has my belief in someone started interfering with my ability to see what's actually there? And who's absorbing the cost of my hesitation while I figure it out? I don't have a clean answer. But I do have a question I try to end with: where are you waiting for more evidence because you don't like what the evidence you already have is asking you to do? My new book, Talk With Trust, is now available: https://a.co/d/05mNRnJH To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerry.siggins/ TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@kerry.siggins

My company is being hit right now. A war in Iran is affecting oil prices, customer behavior is shifting, and my employees are asking me questions I do not have answers to. How long will this last? Are there going to be more changes? Am I going to be okay? That last one is the one underneath all the others. And as the CEO, people expect me to have the answer. What I keep wrestling with is how easy it is to slide from optimism into false reassurance. You want your people to sleep at night. You want them focused on their work, not sitting in anxiety. And so you say things you are not fully certain of, and eventually you have made a promise reality may not allow you to keep. I have done this. I am talking about it because I think most leaders have, and the pressure to perform certainty is real and almost never discussed honestly. What has helped me is a distinction I keep coming back to. Certainty says I know what is going to happen. Confidence says whatever happens, we will face reality and respond to it. The first one I cannot offer my team right now. The second one I can. And that, I think, is what talking with trust actually looks like when there is no clean answer. Just telling the truth about what you know, what you do not know, and what you will do when things change. My new book, Talk With Trust, is now available: https://a.co/d/05mNRnJH To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerry.siggins/ TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@kerry.siggins