As expressed in my last post where I promised to publish one of the most, if not the most elevating motivational speech on management and leadership I ever witnessed; I hereby leave you with wise words from a very wise professional. Simon Sinek needs no introductions; his talks and seminars are profusely broadcasted on the web, and his teachings are pervasive for some, intrusive for others, but extremely relevant for all, i.e., organisations and the people they aggregate. So, in very thoughtful words, what does it mean for Simon Sinek, to be a leader?
"What does it mean to be healthy, what does it mean to be a great parent. I don't have five things to be a great parent, right?! It's a lifestyle and it comes number One, with the commitment that I am responsible for the life of another human being, the growth of another human being. The closest to leadership is parenting. You have to be an infinite student of parenting. You know, if you want to be a parent you ask your friends, you ask your own parents, you join groups, you read magazines, you watch talks, whatever it is you're constantly consuming how to deal with this constantly changing challenge of being a parent. And it's ups and downs and successes and failures, you know? And that's what it is Leadership. Leadership is the same. Great leaders are students of leadership, no matter how achieved they may be. They're still learning. And it's a lifestyle. It's the lifestyle of what I need to do to look after people which includes things like Listening, Learning how to Give and Receive Feedback, Learning how to have effective confrontations, how to discipline when necessary (in a way that's constructive); roam the halls, get to know people. Learning what it means to ask somebody questions. How do you ask questions? Some people are naturally good at being curious about other human beings and some people are uncomfortable because they're introverts or whatever, socially awkward, but we can learn. You know? How do you learn to remember people's names? 'Well, I'm bad at names' - No, you've just decided you're bad at names; we can learn to be good at names, so that when we walk down the hall and say - 'Hey Tom!' / 'Oh my God, he remembers my name?'. It's a nice feeling. It's a lifestyle. There are many many things we have to do and constantly work on to be a great leader, to create that environment.
Everything that we are talking about in the infinite game is really really really hard. it is so much easier to build a company based on short-term ambitions than it is an infinite cause. It just is, right? It's also fun until it's not. Less inspiring but sometimes hitting a goal feels good. It's much easier to just hire and fire people frequently. Hire fast Fire fast, as to hiring slowly and firing slowly because we try and take care of our people as best as we can. It's hard to build teams. All that stuff we talked about Leadership, like what am I supposed to do to build a trusting team? Well, I wish I could give you a list of five things. It's really really hard to be a parent. It's much easier to be an uncle or an ant, or not have kids. It's hard!!! So why do it? It's fun and exciting to be. To try and beat our competitors, but to have to face our own weaknesses every day, that's exhausting. Existential flexibility, I'd rather not. I'd just would rather not. So the reason this takes courage to completely change our mindset about the game that we're actually players in and how we want to approach these things, and do we want to shift our mindset and our organizations to prepare for the infinite game to be organized for the infinite game. It takes courage because we're going to be swimming upstream in a world that is very finite driven. You know the pressures on us are overwhelming from wall street, or our own egos, or from internal incentive structures bosses, whatever it is the pressures are overwhelming for us to play the finite game. And so how do you stand up to massive external pressure? Courage, and courage is something that comes from relationships, it's external. A world famous trapeze artist would never attempt a brand new death defying act for the first time without a net! They would never do it, so why do we think that we could do something difficult without external support too? I've had the opportunity to meet real heroes, people who've risked their lives to save the lives of others with the belief that they were gonna die... and they didn't. And when asked why did you do it they all say something similar which is they would have done it for me. It's external and so we have to take the time to foster and take care of people around us, to nurture our relationships because when we're going to be doing something difficult, when we're going to be swimming upstream, when we're going to be innovating and doing something different, there are days we're going to doubt ourselves, there are days we're going to get knocked in our ass, there are days that storms are going to rise, and we have to have people who say - 'I got your back'. You need to do this, world needs this - 'Keep going, I believe in you'.
Courage comes from not only our willingness to do that for others, but then their willingness to do it for us, and if we commit ourselves to a just cause and we're willing to do those things, then you know the great thing is we take a lot of people with us, and change the world for the better and... isn't that sort of the point of an infinite life? To leave this world in better shape than we found it? To leave the companies that we work for in better shape than when we started? To leave our families stronger and better capable than what they can do without us? Isn't that what it means to live an infinite life that we can literally live on beyond our own lives.
[...] An infinite mindset means that, it is something I can't do but I can influence and take care of the people to the left of me and to the right of me. I can take care of the people who work for me, I can even take care of the person I work for. Sometimes we have a toxic boss not because they're bad but because we don't understand the pressure they're under. Sometimes to simply exhibit empathy to our boss - 'Hey boss you were really harsh on us today, is everything all right? What's going on, I'm worried about you!'. We can succeed together, - 'I'm here to help you'. No matter where we are inside our organisation, leadership is not about rank or authority, leadership is taking responsibility for the people around us. And so anybody, on any team at any rank at any level can be a leader. The first choice is that we have to want to be. A dear friend of mine, lieutenant general George Flynn from the marine corps said that the first criterion to being a leader is you have to want to be one, so any of us can volunteer to be a leader and that's what you do, you commit yourself to seeing that the people with whom we work on a daily basis love coming to work, they feel that someone's got their back, they feel supported, they feel that they have top cover, they feel someone cares about them as a human being listens to them, knows their story, allows them to be themselves. We can be that leader and what you start to see is those teams become really high performing, those teams become super tight and you start to hear rumours across the company because everybody wants into that team because apparently it's a great team to work with, to work on, and before you know it, one of those people goes and moves to another team and they take everything that they learned because leadership is learned and they do it for another team, and if we take that infinite mindset then eventually the tail will wag the dog and it doesn't matter if it's this CEO or another CEO because we will outlast whoever is in charge right now and that's the goal we're doing this for, the good of the organization, we're doing this for the good of the cause, and the tail can wag the dog.
[...] Be the leader you wish you had, become a student of leadership, study it, read about it, watch things about it, practice it every day, be a parent, join the movement means -'I'm going to take care of my team. 'Sometimes I'm in a leadership position, and sometimes I'm not, and it doesn't matter. I'm going to practice leadership'. If I'm a salesperson, if I work at the check-in counter of an airline, I'm going to take care of the people I work with and take care of the customers as if as if they're my family. Practice leadership, learn about it, study it, because I do these things because I recognize I'm just a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, because when we do a jigsaw puzzle the first thing you do is lean the picture of the the box against the wall and then you start putting the pieces together to build that picture. My job in this movement, I'm the guy who points at the box, I'm the one who's pointing at the picture, pointing at the picture maybe pointing out a couple of the pieces and where they go, but I need lots of people to join me, we need lots of people to join us who say I have a piece of the puzzle, I'm willing to lead this way, I'm willing to abandon Milton Friedman ideals and and do something bigger, something more, follow that. Live with an infinite mindset, lead with an infinite mindset and put their piece down and say how can I help build that vision? We need the army and so, how people can engage in the movement is actually practicing all the stuff more than anything else, that's what we need'.
Post image by Matteo Vistocco on Unsplash.
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