Good Day Leaders,
Today I will add some notes from Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek.
As mentioned before, I know some coaches feel they do not have a great deal of time to read so I have created keywords (themes) for you to find, depending on your interest and need, throughout this post. So hit Command+f on a Mac or control+f on a PC to find something specific within one or more of the themes I have created. Additionally, if you are reading this on your phone, turn it sideways (landscape view) for a more reading-friendly view. The themes are as follows:
- Quotes
- Belonging
- Cooperation
- Culture
- Give Time, Not Money
- Group Dynamics
- Leading During Turbulent Times
- Making an Impact
- Millenials
- Multitasking
- Psychological Safety
- Responsibility
- Stability in Organizations
- Trust
- Vision
- Wellbeing
- "The true price of leadership is the willingness to place the needs of others above your own." (Pg. xxi)
- "A lion used to prowl about a field in which Four Oxen used to dwell. Many a time he tried to attack them, but whenever he came near they turned their tails to one another so that which way he approached them he was met by the horns of one of them. At last, however, they fell a-quarrelling among themselves, and each went off to pasture alone in a separate corner of the field. Then the lion attacked them one by one and soon made an end of all four." Aesop, sixth century B.C. (Pg. 24)
- "We never throw an idea away because you never know when someone else will need it." - 3M (Pg. 169)
- "Those at the top, have all the authority and none of the information. Those at the bottom, have all the information and none of the authority." (Pg. 180)
- "I can't delegate my legal responsibilities, I can't delegate my relationships and I can't delegate my knowledge. Everything else, however, I can ask others to take responsibility for." (Pg. 182)
- "The goal is to give no orders. Leaders are to provide direction and intent and allow others to figure out what to do and how to get there." (Pg. 183)
- "Taking responsibility for one's actions must happen at the time you perform your actions, not at the time you get caught." (Pg. 186)
- "How you do anything is how you do everything." (Pg. 197)
- "Teams led by a directive leader initially outperform those led by an empowering leader. However, despite the lower early performance, teams led by an empowering leader experience higher performance improvement over time because of higher levels of team-learning, coordination, empowerment and mental model development." (Pg. 212)
- "Good leadership is like exercise. We do not see any improvement to our bodies with day-to-day comparisons. In fact, if we only compare the way our bodies look on a given day to how they looked the previous day, we would think our efforts had been wasted. It's only when we compare pictures of ourselves over a period of weeks or months that we can see a stark difference. The impact of leadership is also best judged over time." (Pg. 220)
- "Wall Street is in the business of making money between now and next Tuesday. We're in the business of building an organization, an institution that we hope will be here 50 years from now." - Owner of Costco (Pg. 221)
- "We know it's a lot more profitable in the long term to minimize employee turnover and maximize employee productivity, commitment, and loyalty." - Costco Executive (Pg. 221)
- "Empathy is a second by second, minute by minute service that we owe to everyone if we want to call ourselves a leader." (Pg. 287)
Belonging
Give Time, Not Money
- The Spartans, a warrior society in ancient Greece, were feared and revered for their strength, courage, and endurance. The power of the Spartan army did not come from the sharpness of their spears, however; it came from the strength of their shields. Losing one's shield in battle was considered the single greatest crime a Spartan could commit. Spartans excuse without penalty the warrior who loses his helmet or breastplate in battle, but punish the loss of all citizenship rights the man who discards the shield. And the reason was simple. A warrior carriers helmet and breastplate for his own protection, but his shield for the safety of the whole line. (Pg. 27)
- When we don't have a sense of belonging, we wear a T-shirt stamped with the company logo to sleep in or while painting the house. When we have a sense of belonging, however, we wear the company swag in public and with pride. (Pg. 162)
- We work to advance the vision of a leader who inspires us and we work to undermine a dictator who means to control us. (Pg. 173)
- When we are disconnected from the people with whom we work, we spend more time focused on our own needs than the needs of the people for whom we're supposed to be responsible. (Pg. 201)
- It's not the work we remember with fondness, but the camaraderie, how the group came together to get things done. (Pg. 279)
Cooperation
- A Bedouin tribe or nomadic Mongolian family doesn't have much, yet they are happy to share because it is in their interest to do so. (Pg. 117)
- Their survival depends on sharing, for they know that they may be travellers in need of food and shelter another day. Ironically, the more we have, the bigger our fences, the more sophisticated our security to keep people away and the less we want to share. Our desire for more, combined with our reduced physical interaction with the "common folk", starts to create a disconnection or blindness to reality. (Pg. 117)
Culture
- Don't set out to change employees, set out to change the conditions in which employees operate. (Pg. 17)
- In a weak culture, we veer away from doing the right thing in favour of doing the thing that's right for me. (Pg. 162)
- When cultural standards shift from character, values or beliefs to performance, and numbers our will to trust and cooperate dilutes. (Pg. 162)
- Like adding water to a glass of milk, eventually, the culture becomes so watered down it loses all that makes it good and healthy, and by then it only looks like or vaguely tastes like milk. We lose our sense of history, of responsibility to the past and of a shared tradition. (pg. 162)
- The more energy is transferred from the top of the organization to those who are actually doing the job, those who know more about what's going on on a daily basis, the more powerful the organization and the more powerful the leader. (Pg. 184)
- The performance of a company is closely tied to the personality and values of the person at the top. And the personality and values of the person at the top set the tone of the culture. (Pg. 218)
- Money has a relative value ($100 to a college student is a lot, $100 to a millionaire is a little). (Pg. 149)
- Time and effort have absolute values. (Pg. 149-150)
- No matter how rich or poor someone is, or where or when they are born, we all have 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year.
- If someone is willing to give us something of which they have a fixed and finite amount, a completely nonredeemable commodity, we perceive greater value.
- Just as a parent can't buy the love of their children with gifts, a company can't buy the loyalty of its employees with salaries and bonuses. (Pg. 150)
- What produces loyalty, that irrational willingness to commit to the organization even when offered more money elsewhere, is the feeling that the leaders of the company would be willing, when it matters, to sacrifice their time and energy to help us.
Group Dynamics
- Perhaps the closest example of a modern system that mimics our ancestral kinship societies is the college dorm. Though students may have their own rooms (which are usually shared), doors are often left open as students socialize between the rooms. The hallway becomes the center of social life and rooms are for homework and sleeping (and sometimes not even that). The bonds of friendship that form in those dorms are vital. That's where college students tend to develop their closest friendships - not in classrooms. (Pg. 44)
- Those who work hardest to help others succeed will be seen by the group as the leader or the "alpha" of the group. And being the alpha - the strong, supportive one of the group, the one willing to sacrifice time and energy so that others may gain - is a prerequisite for leadership. (Pg. 59)
Leading During Turbulent Times
- Instead of laying people off during the 2008 stock market crash, Barry-Wehmiller (company) implemented a mandatory furlough program. Every employee, from the CEO to secretary, would have to take four weeks of unpaid time off. They could take the weeks off whenever they wanted and the weeks did not have to be taken consecutively.
- CEO's message to all staff during this process - "It is better that we all suffer a little so that none of us has to suffer a lot." (Pg. 86)
- Who says the change has to be sudden or instantaneous? Bob Chapman, Charlie Kim, Captain David Marquet and others did not march in with new theories and start dismantling their organizations. They tinkered. They applied small changes. They experimented. Some of their experiments worked. Some didn't. And in time, momentum built, the changes added up and the organizations and the people within them were transformed. (Pg. 288)
Making an Impact
- As social animals, it is imperative for us to see the actual tangible impact of our time and effort for our work to have meaning and for us to be motivated to do it even better. When we are able to physically see the positive impact of the decisions we make or the work we do, not only do we feel that our work was worth it, but it also inspires us to work harder and do more. (Pg. 147)
- A leader's legacy is only as strong as the foundation they leave behind that allows others to continue to advance the organization in their name. Legacy is not the memory of better times when the old leader was there. That's not legacy, that's nostalgia. (Pg. 211)
Millenials
- There appear to be three dominant factors that impacted, and continue to impact, Millenials most significantly as they grow up: over-parenting, ubiquitous technology and greater opportunities for instant gratification. (Pg. 249)
- There is nothing "wrong" with this generation. Leaders of companies must remember to take their people as they are and respect that their unique experiences growing up impact how they approach the world. This is not something we must consider or practice only for Millenials; we should be practicing empathy with everyone with whom we work. (Pg. 291)
- How to lead Millenials:
- Keep Conference Rooms Free of Cell Phones (Pg. 293)
- When we are on our phones before meetings, we take away opportunities to simply chat. Whether we talk about work, ask about each other's weekends...or even sit in silence together...we are doing little things that go a long way over time.
- Encourage Notetaking on Paper Instead of Computers (Pg. 293)
- According to a study published in Psychological Science, those who take notes on paper are better at processing and retaining information. Though computer note-takers may capture more data, those who use paper are forced to discern which information is more important.
- Teach How to Give and Receive Feedback (Pg. 293-294)
- Example of 360 review system.
- Once a year, each person on a team is asked to write down their top three strengths or areas they believe they've most improved and their three biggest weaknesses or areas they feel they need the most growth. Everyone's answers are consolidated into one document and shared with every member of their team. The team then takes whatever time it takes - half a day or a full day depending on the size of the team - to go through it all. Each person must first read their weaknesses. Then anyone who wants to can add to or comment on that list. At this time, the person sharing their list may not speak. They are prohibited from defending themselves or offering excuses. Their job is to listen. Immediately after, the person reads their strengths. And again, anyone else can add to or comment on the list. Again, the person being reviewed may only listen. At most, we allow clarifying questions. Someone takes responsibility to run the meeting to ensure that anything outside these parameters is quickly shut down.
- Take Advantage of Your Millenials (Pg. 294-295)
- Millennials are more willing to speak out when they are feeling uninspired, disengaged or dissatisfied as an accurate accounting of how everyone in the company feels. If given something that inspires them to engage or stick around, Millenials will fully engage for a long, long time.
- If there is a project or an opportunity that requires lots of quick turns, snap decisions, even risks - throw Millenials at it.
- They are very impressive at a first engagement. Though they may struggle with issues of self-confidence that is valuable for networking or sales. Put them on the front line to sell and let the more experienced employees support them to help build deeper relationships with prospects.
- Mentor and Support Them (Pg. 295)
- Lead by Example (Pg. 295-296)
- Talk about your Failures (Pg. 296)
- Doing do also contributes directly to building safety, helping create a culture in which everyone feels more comfortable to admit mistakes, fears and misgivings.
- Give Them the Opportunity to Fall (Pg. 296)
- Offer More Opportunities to Develop "Human" Skills (Pg. 296)
- Reduce e-mail use, make more calls instead. Roam the halls more to talk to your people and ask more questions.
- Take a Chance on Them (Pg. 296)
- How Millenials Can Reap the Benefits of a Good Culture
- Solve Your Own Problem (Pg. 297-298)
- Push to Completion (Pg. 298-299)
- Beg for Criticism (Pg. 299)
- Real learning happens when things go wrong or when we screw up.
- Unless your company offers a class on how to give and receive feedback, don't assume those around you, including your boss, know how to give feedback.
- Sacrifice Credit (Pg. 299-300)
- The short-term burst of goodness you feel for the extrinsic reward won't last. More important, it won't help you develop the muscle responsible for long-term feelings of fulfillment.
- The more others see you experience real joy in being the shadow player, the more they will seek you out for help. The more they will rely on you and trust you.
Multitasking
- Imagine you are sitting on a place flying at 35,000 feet and 525 miles per hour from New York to Seattle. It's a calm flight. There's no turbulence. It's a clear day and the captain predicts that the whole flight will be a smooth one. Both the captain and the copilot are seasoned pilots with many, many years of experience, and the aircraft is equipped with the most modern avionics and warning systems. As required by the FAA, both pilots fly the airline's simulator a few times a year to practice dealing with various emergencies. A hundred miles away, in a dark room in a building with no windows, sits an air traffic controller with ten years' experience looking down a scope monitoring all the air traffic in his assigned sector. Your flight is currently on his scope. Now imagine that the controller has his cell phone next to him. He is not allowed to make calls while he is on duty, but he can send and receive text messages or access his e-mail. Imagine that he is relaying coordinates to your flight, checking his messages, relaying coordinates to another flight, checking his phone again. Seems fair, right? Only because our lives are at stake do we see this example as stark. So, if we take the life-and-death part away, why would we think that we can do our work, check our phones, write a paragraph, send a text, write another paragraph, send another test, without the same damage to our ability to concentrate. (Pg. 255-256)
- According to brain research, true multitasking does not actually exist. Rather, what we are doing is "mental juggling" or "rapid toggling between tasks." In other words, we aren't doing two things at once, we are merely switching back and forth between things. (Pg. 256)
- It takes time for our brains to reset and return, reset and return. (Pg. 256)
- According to the American Psychological Association, "shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone's productive time." (Pg. 257)
- When a worker is interrupted, it takes them around twenty-three minutes to return to their original task. (Pg. 257)
- In Korea, starting in second grade, students are required to learn about responsible computer use and healthy digital habits. (Pg. 259)
- When our children are conditioned to look for a digital hit when they are stressed, for the rest of their lives, when they suffer social stress, financial stress or career stress, they will turn not to a person for support but to a device. (Pg. 261)
Psychological Safety- If we feel safe among our own people, in our own tribes or organizations, we relax and are more open to trust and cooperation. (Pg. 17)
- One point of view or a single, uncontested power is rarely a good thing. Like the visionary and the operator inside a company, Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the Soviets and Uncle Same in geopolitics, even Mom and Dad at home, the value of two opposing forces, the tensions of push and pull actually keeps things more stable. It's all about balance. (Pg. 105)
- When people trust and share their successes and failures, what they know and what they don't know, the result is innovation. (Pg. 170)
- The best leaders share what they know, ask knowledgeable people for help performing their duties and make introductions to create new relationships within their networks. (Pg. 182)
Responsibility
- Wedding analogy
- After a father gives his daughter's hand away, he will take his place in the pews and trust that her new husband will protect her as he did. It's exactly the same for a company. (Pg. 19)
- Every single employee is someone's son or someone's daughter. Like a parent, a leader if a company is responsible for their precious lives. (Pg. 19)
- It is a leader's job instead to take responsibility for the success of each member of his crew. It is the leader's job to ensure that they are well trained and feel confident to perform their duties. To give them responsibility and hold them accountable to advance the mission. If the captain proves direction and protection, the crew will do what needs to be done to advance the mission. (Pg. 181)
- Leadership is about taking responsibility for lives and not numbers. (Pg. 23)
- Leadership is not a license to do less; it is. a responsibility to do more. (Pg. 286)
Stability in Organizations
- Because it is nearly impossible to get fired once you're in, Next Jump (tech company) takes much more time and is a lot more discerning about who they hire than a lot of other companies in their industry. They don't just consider skills and experience; they spend a lot of time evaluating the character of the candidates who want to work there. For every one hundred candidates, only one will get a job. But you must still meet consistent growth in revenue and profits, despite market conditions, they would have no choice but to turn to other variables within their control like hiring, training and development. Once someone gets in, the leaders of Next Jump make it their priority to help that person grow. (Pg. 73)
- One engineer at the company said that he initially thought the Lifetime Employment policy was a nice idea for some of the lower performing people, but not of much consequence for him, one of the top performers; he wasn't afraid that he would lose his job. What he didn't expect, however, was how much the policy would help him as a group leader. After the policy was implemented, his team started communicating much more openly. Mistakes and problems were pointed out more quickly, long before they escalated. Information sharing and cooperation increased too. Simply because his team no longer feared for their jobs, this group leader saw the performance of his team skyrocket. In fact, the performance of the whole company skyrocketed. (Pg. 74)
- A nuclear-powered submarine is not like a company. In a company, we think that when things go wrong we can simply replace our staff or change technology to make it work better. It's an option that a good too many leaders of companies think is an advantage. It also assumes that the right people are being let go and the right people are being hired. What if we were forced to run our companies like the captain of a submarine? The captain couldn't return to shore and ask for a better crew and a more familiar ship. This is the challenge that a Captain faces. As much as he knows and as smart as he is, he can't have his crew blindly follow his orders - the consequences could be devastating. Everyone needs to be able to think, not just do. (Pg. 180)
- If careers are to be ended, it should be for negligence or incompetence or as a last resort to save the company. But in our twenty-first-century version of capitalism, the expectation that we are working in meritocracies seems falses. In many cases, it doesn't matter how hard we've worked; if the company falls a little short, people will have to be laid off. No hard feeling, it's just business. (Pg. 213)
- Employees are forced to work in atmospheres where short-term performance is valued above all else and where the well-being of people is almost always put second. The consequences of which are empirically bad for the company. (Pg. 214)
- When fight or flight is the name of the game and safety exists, then kill or get fired is the best strategy. Feeling uncertain and insecure, our ability to create relationships and trust in any scalable or meaningful way is near impossible. And when that happens, our work suffers, the culture suffers and the whole organization suffers. (Pg. 217-218)
- Costco prefers to promote longtime employees to executive positions rather than hire from outside and almost never goes looking for business school graduates for managers. (Pg. 222)
- To earn trust, we must extend trust. (Pg. 13)
- There's lots of evidence that children who are deprived of human contact, deprived of sufficient doses of oxytocin, have trouble building trusting relationships later in life. It is also part of the reinforcing bond between athletes, for example, when they high-five, fist-bump or smacks each other. It reinforces the bond they share and the commitment they have to work together for their common goal. (Pg. 63)
- Trust is like lubrication. It reduced friction and creates conditions much more conducive to performance. (Pg. 96)
- If you are going to succeed, you have to learn to trust your bottom-ranked staff more than you trust yourself. (Pg. 179)
- Leadership comes from telling us not what we want to hear, but rather what we need to hear. To be a true leader, to engender deep trust and loyalty, starts with telling the truth. (Pg. 187)
- Trust evolves once we have enough evidence to satisfy our brain that a person or an organization is, indeed, an honest broker. (Pg. 188)
- Building trust requires nothing more than telling the truth. (Pg. 192)
- When a leader has the humility to distribute power across the organization, the strength of the company becomes less dependent on one person and is thus better able to survive. (Pg. 212)
Vision
- If we are unable to adequately measure progress toward the vision, then how will we know if we're making worthwhile progress? Visions of being the "biggest" or "the best" or any other words that so often show up in vision statements, on a biological level, pretty useless if we want to inspire people to work hard to achieve those visions. (Pg. 52)
- Too many company mission and vision statements talk about being the best, the biggest or the most respected - all goals that are self-centred and offer zero contribution to the world. How are Millenials ever to live their Why if the companies that court them don't have a sense of Why themselves? (Pg. 266)
- To really inspire us, we need a challenge that outsizes the resources available. We need a vision of the world that does not yet exist. A reason to come to work. Not just a big goal to achieve. This is what leaders of great organizations do. They frame the challenge in terms so daunting that literally no one yet knows what to do or hot to solve it. (Pg. 283)
- When a company declares that its cause is to become a global leader or to become a household name or to make the best products, those are selfish desires with no intended value to anyone beyond the company itself (and often not even everyone in the company). Those causes can't inspire humans because those causes aren't causes. (Pg. 285)
Wellbeing
- A 2011 study conducted by a team of social scientists at the University of Canberra in Australia concluded that having a job we hate is as bad for our health and sometimes worse than not having a job at all. (Pg. 33)
- According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2013 called "State of the American Workplace," when our bosses completely ignore us, 40 percent of us actively disengage from our work. If our bosses criticize us on a regular basis, 22 percent of us actively disengage. Meaning, even if we're getting criticized, we are actually more engaged simply because we feel that at least someone is acknowledging that we exist. And if our bosses recognize just one of our strengths and reward us for doing what we're good at, only 1 percent of us actively disengage from the work we're expected to do. (Pg. 34)
- Those who feel they have more control, who feel empowered to make a decision instead of waiting for approval, suffer less stress. (Pg. 36)
- Human resources consultancy Mercer LLC reported that between the fourth quarter of 2010 and the first quarter of 2011, one in three employees seriously considered leaving their jobs, up 23 percent from five years prior. The problem was that less than 1.5 percent of employees actually voluntarily left. This is one of the issues with a bad working environment. Like a bad relationship, even if we don't like it, we don't leave. Maybe it's the feeling of the devil-you-know-is-better-than-the-devil-you-don't or maybe it's something else, but people seem to feel stuck in unhealthy work environments. (Pg. 37)
- A study at the Graduate School of Social Work at Boston College found that a child's sense of well-being is affected less by the long hours their parents put in at work and more by the mood their parents are in when they come home. Children are better off having a parent who works into the night in a job they love than a parent who works shorter hours but comes home unhappy. This is the influence our jobs have on our families. Working late does not negatively affect our children, but rather, how we feel at work does. (Pg. 38)
