Book Summary — Leaders Eat Last
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1 paragraph summary:
Simon Sinek breaking down what makes leaders and what brings and holds groups together. Leaders are there to protect the group and provide a Circle of Safety for everyone to live their best lives.
Leaders are the ones who run headfirst into the unknown.
They rush toward the danger.
They put their own interests aside to protect us or to pull us into the future.
Leaders would sooner sacrifice what is theirs to save what is ours.
And they would never sacrifice what is ours to save what is theirs.
This is what it means to be a leader.
It means they choose to go first into danger, headfirst toward the unknown.
And we feel sure they will keep us safe, we will march behind them and work tirelessly to see their visions come to life and proudly call ourselves their followers.
Part 1 — Our Need to Feel Safe
Leaders provide cover from above and the people on the ground look out for each other. This is the reason they are willing to push hard and take the kinds of risks they do. And the way any organization can achieve this is with empathy.
Chapman understood that to earn the trust of people, the leaders of an organisation must first treat them like people. To earn trust, he must extend trust.
When the people have to manage dangers from inside the organisation, the organisation itself becomes less able to face the dangers from outside.
Truly human leadership protects an organisation from the internal rivalries that can shatter a culture. When we have to protect ourselves from each other, the whole organisation suffers. But when trust and cooperation thrive internally, we pull together and the organisation grows stronger as a result.
Operating in a hostile, competitive world in which each group was in pursuit of finite resources, the systems that helped us survive and thrive as a species also work to help organisations achieve the same. There are no fancy management theories and it is not about hiring dream teams. It is just a matter of biology and anthropology. If certain conditions are met and the people inside an organisation feel safe among each other, they will work together to achieve things none of them could have ever achieved alone. The result is that their organisation towers over their competitors.
Every single employee is someone’s son or daughter. Like a parent, a leader of a company is responsible for their previous lives.
It is the ability to grow one’s people to do what needs to be done that creates stable, lasting success. It is not the genius at the top giving directions that makes people great. It is great people that make the guy at the top look like a genius.
Intimidation, humiliation, isolation, feeling dumb, feeling useless and rejection are all stresses we try to avoid inside the org. But the danger inside is controllable and it should be the goal of leadership to set a culture free of danger from each other. And the way to do that is by giving people a sense of belonging. By offering them a strong culture based on a clear set of human values and beliefs. By giving them the power to make decisions. By offering trust and empathy. By creating a Circle of Safety.
Stress and anxiety at work have less to do with the work we do and more to do with the weak management and leadership. When we know that there are people at work who care about how we feel, our stress levels decrease.
It is not the demands of the job that cause the most stress, but the degree of control workers feel they have throughout the day. The studies also found that the effort required by a job is not in itself stressful, but rather the imbalance between the effort we give and the reward we feel. Put simply: less control, more stress.
The lower someone’s rank in the org hierarchy, the greater the risk of stress-related health problems, not the other way around.
Part 2 — Powerful Forces
This is what work-life balance means. It has nothing to do with the hours we work or the stress we suffer. It has to do with where we feel safe. If we feel safe at home, but we don’t feel safe at work, then we suffer what we perceive to be a work-life imbalance. If we have strong relationships at home and at work, if we feel like we belong, if we feel protected in both, then the powerful forces of a magical chemical like oxytocin can diminish the effect of stress and cortisol. With trust, we do things for each other. All of which adds up to our sense of security inside a Circle of Safety. We have a feeling of comfort and confidence at work that reduces the overall stress we feel because we do not feel our well-being is threatened.
The cost of leadership is self-interest. That’s also the reason we give our alphas first choice of mate. If they die early while trying to defend us, we want to make sure all those strong genes stay in our gene pool. The group isn’t stupid. We wouldn’t give them all those perks for nothing. That wouldn’t be fair.
The social contract is deeply ingrained in what it means to be human. If our leaders are to enjoy the trappings of their position in the hierarchy, then we expect them to offer us protection.
What makes a good leader is that they eschew the spotlight in favour of spending time and energy to do what they need to do to support and protect their people. And when we feel the Circle of Safety around us, we offer our blood and sweat and tears and do everything we can to see our leader’s vision come to life. They only thing our leaders ever need to do is remember whom they serve and it will be our honor and pleasure to serve them back.
All the perks, all the benefits and advantages you may get for the rank or position you hold, they aren’t meant for you. They are meant for the role you fill. And when you leave your role, which eventually you will, they will give the ceramic cup to the person who replaces you. Because you only ever deserved a Styrofoam cup.
Part 3 — Reality
And that’s what trust is. We don’t just trust people to obey the rules, we also trust that they know when to break them. The rules are there for normal operations. The rules are designed to avoid danger and help ensure that things go smoothly. And though there are guidelines for how to deal with emergencies, at the end of the day, we trust the expertise of a special few people to know when to break the rules.
The responsibility of leaders is to teach their people the rules, train them to gain competency and build their confidence. At that point, leadership must step back and trust that their people know what they are doing and will do what needs to be done. In weak orgs without oversight, too many people will break the rules for personal gain. That’s what makes the orgs weak. In strong orgs, people will break the rules because it is the right thing to do for others.
Our confidence to do what’s right is determined by how trusted we feel by our leaders.
As much as we like to think that it’s our smarts that get us ahead, it is not everything. Our intelligence gives us ideas and instructions. But it is our ability to cooperate that actually helps us get those things done.
Trust is like lubrication. It reduces friction and creates conditions much more conducive to performance.
Part 4 — How We Got Here
Every generation seems to confound or revel against the generation before it. Each new generation emobodies a set of values and beliefs molded by the events, experiences and technologies of their youth… which tend to be a little different from those of their parents.
The very concept of putting a number or a resource before a person flies directly in the face of the protection our anthorpology says leaders are supposed to offer. It’s like parents puttig the care of their car before the care of their child. It can rip the very fabric of the family.
Part 5 — The Abstract Challenge
Abundance can be destructive not becauase it is bad for us, per se. Abundance can be destructive because it abstracts the value of things. The more we have, the less we seem to value what we’ve got. And if the abstraction of stuff makes us value it less, imagine what it does to our relationships.
The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is statistic.
— Joseph Stalin
The only way to manage at scale is to empower the levels of management. They can no longer be seen as managers who handle or control people. Instead, managers must become leaders in their own right, which means they must take responsibility for the care and protection of those in their charge, confident that their leaders will take care of them.
<40 people = “Our” lieutenant
>40 people = “The” lieutenant
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.
Business is a human enterprise. It may even be why we call a business a “company” — because it is a collection of people in the company of other people. It’s the company that matters.
Part 6 — Destructive Abundance
I can’t delegate my legal responibility, relationships and knowledge. Everything else, however, I can ask others to take responsibility for. Even though the first we can’t be handed of they can be shared.
The goal of a leader is to give no orders. Leaders are to provide direction and intent and allow other to figure out what to do and how to get there.
Responsibility is not doing as we are told, that’s obedience. Responsibility is doing what is right.
Leadership is about integrity, honesty and accountability. All components of trust. 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.
We expect that both people and companies will make mistakes and dumb choices. We’re perfectly at peace with that. Making all the right decisions is not what engenders trust between people or between people and orgs. Being honest does.
There is something about getting together out of context that makes us more open to getting to know someone. Whether we’re bonding with colleagues with whom we play on the company softball team, out to lunch or on a business trip with someone we don’t know well, when the responsibilities of our jobs are not foricing us to work togehter, when our competing interests are put aside for a while, we seem to be quite open to oseeing others as people rather than coworkers or competitors.
Customer will never love a company, until the employees love it first.
Part 8— Becoming a Leader
It is not work we remember with fondness, but the camaraderie, how the group came together to get things done.
For most of us, we have warmer feelings for the projects we worked on where everything seemed to go wrong. We remember how the group stayed at work till 3am at cold pizza and barely made a deadline. Those are the experiences we remember as some of our best days at work. It was not because of the hardships, per se, but because the hardship was shared. It is not the work we remember with fondness, but the camaraderie.
In other words, when we share the hardship, we biologically grow closer.
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. Those causes can’t inspire humans because those causes aren’t causes. No one wakes up in the morning inspired to champion that.
Human beings have thrived for 50k years not because we are driven to serve oruselves, but because we are inspired to serve others. All we need are leaders to give us a good reason to commit ourselves to each other.
Everything about being a leader is like being a parent. It is about committing to the well-being of those in our care and having a willingness to make sacrifices to see their interests advanced so that they may carry our banner long after we are gone.
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