Leading by Example Is Not a Technique for Moving People

Introduction: The Dividing Line

What leading by example means, and how to practise it, are already well documented. What this article takes up is the dividing line in front of that. Is setting an example a technique for moving people?

The question cannot be avoided. Once it has been said that techniques of influence are seen through and that a performed self comes apart, it follows naturally to ask: is showing an example not also an attempt to produce a particular impression?

Here is the conclusion first. There is a decisive difference between the two, and it lies not in how the act looks but in the direction the act faces. The same conduct becomes, on one side, the ground of trust, and on the other, impression management. There is only one dividing line.

The Same Act, Issuing from Two Different Places

Showing an example through one’s own conduct can serve two entirely different ends.

One is holding yourself first to what you genuinely believe matters. The other is moving someone by letting them see it. The act may look identical and the two issue from wholly different places.

In the first case, the act does not depend on whether anyone is watching. It is a question of consistency between what you hold and how you live day to day. It does not change in a setting where nobody sees. If anything, how you conduct yourself when nobody is watching is where the substance of that consistency resides. People may see it, feel something, and come closer. That is a by-product, not the aim.

The second case is different in kind. The moment being seen becomes the aim, showing an example turns into self-presentation calculated around a response. The focus moves from your own consistency to how you register with someone else. At that point the act has become another thing.

What Distinguishes Them Shows When Nobody Is Watching

Concretely. Suppose someone, in line with what they hold, takes on the hardest work before anyone else. If they continue exactly the same when nobody notices, it is consistency with their own goal.

If the same act is performed attentively only in front of an audience, and an entirely different face appears where there is none, it is no longer consistency but management of an impression. The form is the same; one issues from within the person, the other is assembled to fit the gaze of others.

From outside they are frequently indistinguishable. Two people may move early and choose sincere words alike, and one is simply following their own goal while the other has factored in how it will be assessed. What distinguishes them is not the look of the act but whether it continues when nobody is watching. A consistency that collapses out of view was never consistency; it was staging.

Why Consistency Draws People More Than Technique

That is the distinction. Now the question of why only one of them works.

The social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven classified the routes by which one person influences another into five: reward, coercion, legitimate position, expertise, and the power arising from another’s regard and identification — referent power [French & Raven, 1959].

Only the last differs in kind. Reward, coercion, position, and expertise all require continuous supply to retain their force. Cut the reward and the reason to comply goes with it; let the threat fade and the discipline loosens. Referent power alone does not disappear when supply stops. It arises the moment someone feels I would like to hold what that person holds, and while the feeling lasts it operates on its own.

And it has a decisive property: you cannot manufacture “appearing consistent” on purpose. Appearing is classified as technique, and technique is detected with high accuracy by the other person’s sensitivity to the non-verbal. It cannot be bought, performed, or acquired on a course.

There is more. Technique inserts a medium. The more technique is acquired, the more it interposes itself between you and the other person. The more it interposes, the more what they can identify with shifts away from you and toward the role you are playing. Someone identified with a role leaves the moment the role slips.

Technique widens the distance as it is polished; consistency of existence narrows it as it is held. That asymmetry is the answer.

Believing Yourself Consistent, and Actually Being So

What separates those two? How much space sits between the words professed and the conduct performed.

The organisational psychologist Tony Simons named the perception of how far stated values and actual conduct match behavioural integrity, and showed empirically that the strength of that perception predicts trust, attitudes toward the organisation, and performance [Simons, 2002, Organization Science].

What matters is that the one judging the alignment is never you but always the observer. However certain you are of your own consistency, if those around you find a gap between the words and the conduct, trust is damaged. It is an assessment established not by self-report but by continuous observation from outside.

And people learn from consistent models. What Albert Bandura demonstrated is that behaviour is acquired through observation rather than instruction [Bandura, 1977]. The academic ground on which setting an example works sits here.

Is the “Self” You Are Being Consistent With Borrowed?

There is one more trap, easy to miss. What if the ideal you are aligning yourself to was borrowed from outside?

The psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot showed that the degree to which a goal connects with a person’s own values and interests — self-concordance — predicts how long the pursuit is sustained and how durable the satisfaction is afterwards [Sheldon & Elliot, 1999, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology]. Goals handed down from elsewhere tend to leave emptiness even when achieved.

Ideal figures are supplied in attractive form, ready-made. The charismatic executive, the celebrated commander. People receive the image as though it were what they had wanted all along and set about aligning to it. But the image belonged to someone else from the start.

A borrowed alignment collapses under slight load, because what is lost is not your goal but a goal on loan. An alignment with no core to protect does not last.

Aim at It and It Degrades into Impression Management

To gather this into one dividing line.

If you want influence, stop chasing influence. What is to be pursued is not influence but the consistency of how you mean to be, and influence arrives, unaimed at, in the wake of that consistency holding.

And the moment it is aimed at, it degrades into impression management. When setting an example is made instrumental — in order to move them — the direction of the act inverts. The outward form is unchanged; what happens inside it is entirely different.

This is not a line understood once and then done with. It is a boundary to be put back to yourself with each day’s decisions. Is the conduct being accumulated now following your own goal, or assembled around an anticipated response?

In Summary: This Is the Practice Being Defended

What this article cuts away is only the move that converts setting an example into a method for moving people.

Setting an example, holding yourself first to what you profess, working to align your daily conduct with your own words — these are not merely spared but defended by the grounds set out above. The one source of influence that does not vanish when supply stops is this alignment and nothing else.

And the turn carries a second effect. Direct the thing to be moved at your own consistency and the mechanism of evaluation itself changes. Whether someone responded as hoped is no longer the criterion by which you are scored. The criterion becomes one thing only: how far what you hold and what you did today lined up.

It will feel unsettled at first, because a legible signal — another person’s reaction — is being given up for a criterion invisible from outside. Take that unsettledness as the sign that the authority to evaluate is genuinely returning to your own hands.

Where influence originates is taken up in can charisma be learned?; how technique is seen through, in why influence techniques push people away; the environment in which a group builds its own sense of capability, in the environment that grows collective efficacy; and the design of relationships as a whole in leadership in a community.

References

Academic papers

• Simons, T. “Behavioral Integrity: The Perceived Alignment Between Managers’ Words and Deeds as a Research Focus” (2002) Organization Science, 13(1)
• Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. “Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-Being: The Self-Concordance Model” (1999) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3)
• Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. “An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust” (1995) Academy of Management Review, 20(3)

Books and originals

• French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. “The Bases of Social Power” (1959) in Studies in Social Power, University of Michigan
• Bandura, A. Social Learning Theory (1977) Prentice-Hall