Day 1 – Closing Keynote – 4:15-5:00 PM
Room: Affectiv
Your Leadership Brand Is What People Say When You’re Not in the Room
McKay Christensen · RizeCon 2026 · Pocatello
McKay Christensen started at Procter & Gamble out of graduate school, working on brands like Tide, Crest, and Old Spice. Every one of those brands had a brand promise — a clear statement of what the consumer could expect. Old Spice’s brand promise was to empower men to be bold, confident, and unforgettable. McKay’s question for RizeCon: do you have one of those for your leadership? And have you ever written it down?
His session moved through history, psychology, neuroscience, and one very personal story about a 14-ton harvester and a farm manager named Stan — all in service of a single argument: your words have power, your team cannot see what you cannot help them see, and if you define your leadership brand intentionally, you will lead differently.
What he covered
Leadership brand: what it is and why it matters. McKay defines a leadership brand as the culture you create, the reputation you develop, the identity you carry, and the perception people hold of you — in short, what people say about you when you’re not in the room. The point isn’t to manage perception. It’s to build it intentionally, the same way world-class consumer brands are built: with clarity about the promise you extend to the people who follow you.
The founding fathers as case studies. George Washington stepped away from the presidency after two terms not because a law required it — the 22nd Amendment didn’t arrive until 1951 — but because he knew that using power for his own benefit would compromise the kind of leader he wanted to be. His brand: service over self-interest. John Hancock, who had given nearly all of his wealth to Boston during the Revolutionary War and served five times as governor of Massachusetts, stood in front of the Massachusetts ratification convention and cast a vision for what America could become if it united behind a constitutional framework. Even Samuel Adams, who didn’t like Hancock, stood in support. The vote passed 187 to 168. Historians largely agree that without Hancock’s accumulated credibility and that speech, the Constitution would not exist.
You cannot be what you cannot see. McKay cited the Japanese proverb: a frog in a well cannot conceive of the ocean. No change — personal, organizational, or otherwise — can happen unless someone first gets a new view of what’s possible. This is the central power of a leadership brand: when you see people as who they can become rather than who they are today, your behavior toward them shifts in ways that become self-fulfilling. McKay’s PhD research found that the most influential leaders said, almost universally, the same thing: “I don’t see people as they are today. I see them as they can be tomorrow.” That view made their mentorship and leadership genuinely authentic — and the people following them could read that authenticity and chose to stay.
Words create worlds. McKay introduced the belief window — the mental frame through which every person filters their daily experience, shaped by beliefs accumulated over a lifetime, some accurate and many erroneous. A child who decided she wasn’t good at accounting because she wasn’t good at math placed a belief on her window that would shape every course she took and every career she considered. The job of a leader is to help people place correct beliefs on their belief windows and then nurture those beliefs over time. One word can change everything: an MIT study found that students who received a written description of a substitute teacher with the word “warm” described him as humorous, caring, and worth returning to. Students who got the word “cold” described the same teacher as self-centered and egotistical.
The boat behind the race car. Dale Earnhardt Sr., on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, radioed to his son and teammate: “You guys take off. I will block.” He blocked. They won. He died on that last turn. At the memorial service, Dale Jr. quoted his father: “If you ever want to win in NASCAR, you’ve got to unhook that boat that you’re dragging behind your race car and race.” McKay applies it to leadership: most of us drag a boat. It’s the excuses, the things we don’t want to let go of, the comforts that keep us from taking full responsibility for where we and our organizations will stand. Unhooking the boat is the decision to lead with purpose, not just intention.
Pros show up anyway. Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art argues that the hardest part of writing isn’t the writing — it’s sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is resistance. The cure is realizing you’re a pro. Pressfield’s moment of recognition came when a movie he co-wrote flopped at its premiere and his writing partner asked, “Are you going to quit?” He said no. That was when he knew. McKay illustrated this with the story of the 2012 US Olympic basketball team in Barcelona: LeBron, Wade, and Carmelo came back from a night out at 5:00 a.m. and found Kobe Bryant in the elevator heading to the gym. At noon, when they came down to practice, he was just finishing. Dwyane Wade said from that night on, all of them understood what it meant to be a pro. Pros don’t let mood or circumstance determine whether they show up.
Sarah Thomas and staying in the game. Sarah Thomas came out of breast cancer treatment at 37, at her highest weight ever, and decided to swim the English Channel four times — a distance never achieved by any swimmer, man or woman. She expected the swim to take 54 hours. She expected to cover 84 miles. It took longer and she swam 134. The GPS map of her route has no straight lines. What it shows, at the very end, is a cluster of red dots so tightly packed they’re nearly on top of each other — she was fighting a current and making almost no visible progress after 130-plus miles. She made it anyway. McKay’s lesson: there are no straight lines in building anything worth building. Staying in the game, especially in the seasons when progress is invisible, is itself a form of leadership.
Write your brand promise. McKay’s closing challenge: write it down. His own reads: “My leadership brand promise is to see the potential in those I lead and to use a voice of belief and courage to help them reach their goals.” He reads it daily. It guides his actions. Coach K’s brand promise was about creating a collective unit that performed better than any individual and developing players over winning. The UCLA women’s basketball coach whose team just won the NCAA championship described her brand as: “Our talent is the floor, but our character is the ceiling.”
What attendees got
McKay offered to send the full slide deck to anyone who reaches out. His contact information was on his closing slide. He also issued a direct call to action: take the time after the session to draft your leadership brand promise. Even a rough draft is a starting point.
One story that landed
McKay was a young man working on a sod farm when he jumped too far trying to sit next to a friend on the back of a 14-ton harvester. The machine — moving at two miles per hour — caught his foot, rolled up his leg, broke his femur in half, crushed his pelvis, broke most of his ribs, and broke his back in two places. His lungs collapsed bilaterally. He couldn’t breathe. He was certain, with complete certainty, that he was going to die in seconds. Stan, the farm manager, came running, knelt down, took McKay’s head in his hands, and started talking. “McKay, you’re going to live. You’re going to walk again. You’re going to graduate from high school. You’re going to go to college. You’re going to be a leader. You’re going to have a family.” McKay, who had been waiting to close his eyes, started to pull back. Every time Stan made a proclamation, McKay found he could hold on for one more minute. He spent a year recovering. Every time physical therapy was hard, he thought of what Stan said. Every time he wanted to quit college, he thought of what Stan said. “Your words have power,” McKay told the room. “And what you say, how you believe, the things you say to others in your leadership have significant impact.”
“I don’t see people on my team as they are today. I see people as they can be tomorrow.” — The common answer from influential leaders in McKay Christensen’s research
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, then you are a leader.” — John Quincy Adams, as cited by McKay Christensen
About the speaker
McKay Christensen began his career at Procter & Gamble after graduate school, working across a portfolio of major consumer brands. He now leads one of the larger foundations in the Mountain West, with approximately 900 employees, and works extensively in fundraising and community development. His PhD and post-graduate research focused on what makes influential leaders influential — the research that produced the finding that the most influential leaders consistently see people as who they can become, not who they are today. He reads a book a week and has since turned that discipline into a leadership practice.