What does it look like to lead by example instead of trying to convince people?

Most leaders reach for the argument first. The memo that lays out the reasoning. The framework that makes the case. The all-hands where you finally say the thing clearly enough that people have to agree. It's the instinct, because arguments are fast, and they're measurable — you said it, they nodded, you can point to the moment it happened.

Leading by example doesn't work that way, and that's exactly why it's harder to trust.

In 2018, I made a decision that looked, from the outside, like a step backward. My husband and I left a fast, comfortable life to retire early, move somewhere smaller, homeschool our kids, and build our days around the seasons instead of a calendar. I didn't make that decision to prove a point to anyone. I made it because something in me had been building toward it since 2009, when I first started choosing what was right for me over what was rewarded.

The people closest to me didn't wait to see how it turned out before they had opinions. You don't know how to homeschool. What will you do for money? What will you do with your days? Underneath the questions was a clearer verdict: I was wasting my life. My education. My skills.

I didn't have a counter-argument ready, and I didn't spend years building one. I didn't need everyone to agree with the choice. I just needed to actually live inside it, long enough for it to stop being a theory.

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you're used to leading through argument: leading by example doesn't ask anyone to agree with you, even privately. It just puts a different way of living in front of someone, consistently, for long enough that it stops looking like a phase and starts looking like a real option.

Last year, my sister told me something I didn't expect. She still works part time — in part, she said, because of how she'd watched me refuse the version of work-life balance most people treat as normal. Her kids are still in grade school. She's not ready to change anything yet, and maybe she never will be. We had never resolved our disagreement about any of this out loud. I don't think we'd even discussed it directly in years. She'd just watched me choose differently, at close range, for long enough that it became real to her — not because I convinced her, but because I didn't stop living it.

That's the trade you're making if you choose this route over the argument: you give up the certainty of knowing whether it worked, and in exchange you get something an argument can't actually produce — a change someone makes on their own terms, because they finally believed it was possible, not because they ran out of objections.

A few things are true about this approach that are worth knowing before you choose it.

You don't get real-time feedback. There's no version of a town hall where you find out, that day, whether it's working. I didn't know any of this had reached my sister until she told me, more than a decade after I made the choice she was responding to. If you need to know your influence is working before you can keep believing in it, this isn't the mechanism for you — but neither, probably, is real change in the people around you.

It requires you to actually hold the different way, not perform it. A boundary you drop the first time it's inconvenient, a slower pace you abandon under pressure — those don't read as an example. They read as a phase, and people file them accordingly. What made the difference for my sister wasn't a single conversation or a single visible choice. It was years of it.

It doesn't require the other person to come around to your view. My sister and I never actually agreed on the work-life balance question in conversation. She didn't need to concede the argument to be moved by watching someone live a different answer to it.

If you're in a leadership role and you're tired of making the case for a way of working that isn't getting through in meetings or memos, this might be the more honest question to sit with: are you willing to actually become the thing you want other people to consider, and hold it long enough — without knowing if or when it reaches anyone — for it to stop being an argument and start being evidence?

You may never find out if it worked. Sometimes you do, the way I did. Often you won't. That uncertainty is the actual cost of choosing this over persuasion — and, as far as I can tell, it's also the only way this kind of change has ever really traveled.

Go deeper: read the full story behind this — "The Edge of the Crowd" — on Substack