Leaders Eat Last
Simon Sinek
This book has a very strong point of view; the author admits that it is a polemic. Basically, being a leader means putting others first and making sure that the organizations that they lead do the same. In business, this means putting people ahead of money. A good business leader needs others skills as well, but no group of people will extend themselves for someone who is all about the numbers. Many leaders in many organizations put money before people, which ironically leads them to put themselves before the organization.
I struggled find a way to summarize this book. One summarization is that it is easy to start down some path and get carried away. We live in a competitive society and our competitive nature drives us to be bigger, faster, more esteemed. This drives us to extremes and we are living today in a society which has emphasized management-by-numbers over leading people.
But this perspective also asserts that putting people first allows the people to pull together to deal with the external world much more effectively. We are stronger together than we are apart. But many organizations fail to create a sense of safety for its people. When people have to manage dangers from inside the organization, the organization itself becomes less able to face the dangers from outside.* No army can fight a battle on two fronts and individuals are no different. Leaders are in a position to eliminate the sources of many internal dangers and direct all the organization’s resources to overcome external challenges. From this perspective, 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.
Sinek uses the image of a “circle of safety” to suggest that everybody within an organization needs to be inside the circle. If some people are safer than others, then this creates an internal front where danger can arise. We often complain about bureaucracy because that bureaucracy seems to be more about protecting something or someone inside the organization from others in the organization – not as an efficient and effective way to accomplish work. When we see the bureaucracy working for us we have few problems. But when we see the bureaucracy working at cross purposes and we do not understand their intent, we sense danger. This is an example of the importance of visible intent; when we understand their intent, we can forgive mistakes. Otherwise, we suspect the worst.
This book takes a number of tangents that “explain” some of how/why we do and feel the way we do. For example, Sinek explains the (simplified) roles to serotonin (associated with success), dopamine (associated with pleasure), oxytocin (associated with belonging), and endorphin (associated with pain masking). Our feelings are the result of our reactions to these chemicals. Our evolutionary process selected these systems because they helped humans to survive and reproduce while still on the savannah. Again simplistically, these four chemicals “addicted” us to accomplishment, to ignoring discomfort or pain in pursuit of goals, to bonding to our tribe mates for safety, and to both lead and follow others. The key thing to recognize is that these feelings increased our evolutionary success in a world where we were not the fastest, strongest, most poisonous and dangerous animal – as an individual. The human advantage was cooperation within our tribe to defend ourselves and to seek safety. Today, we are no longer in danger from big cats, but our emotional system is vigilant for this danger. We may feel unsafe, not from physical attack, but from loss of economic security, tribal belonging, status within the group or autonomy; and these “small” threats leave us in a constant state of alarm. This alarm degrades our ability to react to events with our full attention and as a group; we are more likely to act on our own to try to protect ourselves. When leaders create a good sense of safety for their organization, people experience decreased stress and more ability to respond for the good of the tribe (organization). The main point here is that our bodies, and thus our minds, are reacting to our sense of the environment.
One can imagine that leadership evolved as a way for a group to choose the best person to confront danger on behalf of the group. To incent this confrontational role, we gave them deference and benefits during calmer times. The leader’s role thus involved physical risk and potential sacrifice. Over the centuries, the physical risk has mostly disappeared, but the basic contract has not. We provide a leader with following (enhancing their status) in exchange for a potential sacrifice. When we detect an unwillingness to collect the benefits without making the sacrifice, the contract is broken.
One of the things that makes it easier for managers to contemplate actions that diminish safety is abstraction. When people are not individuals, but employees, then it is easier to talk about the number and skill of employees. As Josef Stalin said, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.” As organizations have become bigger and more complicated, it has become much harder for senior people in an organization to know all of the people; it is hard to even know all the senior people. On the one hand, this means that executives must deal at some level of abstraction. But it also means that they must make special efforts to create a culture that is transmitted through the organization that conveys the sense that people really belong, are valued as individuals (not simply human resources), and experience the same degree of safety and inclusion that people at the top do. That everybody really is in it together.
Creating a safer culture could involve the following steps.
- Bring people together. This is not simply visiting people through the organization, but helping them connect person-to-person. Having a broad set of connections helps people feel part of something bigger than their local group. These connections need not be deep, but they help bind the organization together.
- Recognize the consequences of group size. Sociologists believe that we can only relate well to about 150 people; this is our tribe. Organizations with more people than this should find ways to establish smaller tribes to enable people to be part of a realistic group.
- Help people understand the impact that they have on customers or clients. Make this specific, by having customers tell their story of being served, for example. Numerous studies show that when people can make a personal link between their work and their customer’s experience, it is easier for them to be proactive in serving. While this might seem like an obvious thing to do, a survey of several thousand executives showed that only 1 percent of executives said managers should bother showing employees that there work makes a difference. Knowing that you and your coworkers have an impact on others helps connect people in a common goal.
- Invest time in people. Providing money will not make people unhappy, but money is not attention. Just like a child prefers their parent’s attention to a gift, employees (at some level) recognize the greater value of a person’s time and attention compared to money. Giving money is easy – spending time is hard. Time is the most limiting resource that an person has and how they spend that time communicates an enormous amount of information to people.
- Be patient. Building trust is hard at any time. A person coming into an organization with a history of mistrust will need to be consistent and persistent to allow people to overcome their suspicions and pull together.
One of the interesting stories involved a captain of a nuclear submarine. This man had been informed that he would be made captain of an attack submarine. He was smart, hard-working and so he studied everything about this submarine. He knew all about the whole crew (which was top notch) and ship’s equipment. He could probably do every job himself if needed. Just before he was to take command, he was reassigned to a missile boat (a very different ship), one with a terrible record and a crew rated among the worst. He had no time to prepare for this assignment, so he just had to go with what he knew. One their first trip, he decided to take the crew through some drills to see how they reacted. He wanted to stress them some, so he kept upping the ante. At one point, he decided to speed the boat up so he ordered all-ahead 2/3. The executive order duly repeated the order 2/3 ahead, but the boat’s speed did not change. After a moment, the captain, asked if the helmsman had heard the order and he answered yes. The captain was preparing to shout at the helms man and asked “what’s the problem?”. The helmsman answered “There is no 2/3 setting.” The captain turned to the executive officer and asked if he knew this and the EO answered yes. The captain then asked why he repeated the order that he knew was impossible to execute. The executive officer answered “Because you told me to.” This was a crew trained to blindly follow orders, On this boat, the captain did not know everything and yet had all the power. He realized that he needed to give power to those who knew better and trust them to do what they knew how to do. One sign of the change that occurred was that crew members stopped asking for permission - as in, “permission to submerge the boat?” Instead they developed the practice of announcing their intension. For example, “Sir, I intend to submerge the ship” which could then be acknowledged or revised as appropriate. The crew was empowered to act by this change in approach. Over a few years, the crew became the highest rated in the fleet, the reenlistment rate went up 10-fold and three times the normal number of officers from this crew gained their own commands. The captain came to understand that the goal of the leader is to give no orders…Leaders are to provide direction and intent and to allow others to figure out what to do…
The book backs into an important observation. Being a leader is quite distinct from being in charge or at least we need to rethink what it means to be in charge. Perhaps it means less controlling and actually more following. Perhaps the counterintuitive lesson of the previous story is that it is a special kind of leader who leads by following. The book finishes by making the case that leaders earn their role by their service to their followers. Over the last 20 years, management has become a more abstract, quantitative practice that has lost sight of the people involved. The term “servant leadership” has been around for many years, but it may need to be revived as a counter-weight to quantitative management.
Comment and interpretation:
- This book is a bit of a rant about powerful people who think that the system/organization exist to serve them and that they somehow deserve that more than others. This made writing this summary difficult. But circumstances led me to start reading another book before I’d finished this one (and about 1/3 of the way through the summary. Interestingly, the other book started with a different perspective on the same situation. That book supposes that leaders want a different outcome than they get; perks arise out of a drive for convenience and control – but get institutionalized. This perspective put something from this book into better context. Our trust derives in part from our understanding of leaders’ intent. When a perk is an artifact of an action that benefits the organization, it is acceptable. But when it seems to benefit them without creating an organizational benefit, it seems unacceptable.
- I’d bet the germ of this book was the widespread reporting of executive compensation rising in companies that were failing and discarding staff in big bunches. The author cited the specific case of the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, who rose to the top by a combination of ruthless cost cutting and willingness to risk the firm’s assets on novel financial trades. The company collapsed and was sold to another bank when these trades created nearly $10 billion in losses. When the CEO was fired, his severance was $160MM. Imagine that you were employed at Merrill Lynch and lost your job or had a pay cut or worried by either option. The person who led you to this point walked away with a lot of money. Where was the sacrifice? What gave this person the right to be called leader or to be rewarded after destroying the company? I can rant too.
- I have always made a distinction between management and leadership because I have seen so many examples in my career of individuals capable of one without the other. Leaders with no management ability. Good managers with no leadership skill. Finally, the small number of individuals with both. I think a big portion of this book would feel different if this distinction was applied. Taken one step further, we should accept that managers perform an important role, BUT not all managers provide leadership. Equally, not all leaders should be put into management positions. What I wonder is how hard it would be for organizations to candidly make this distinction and allocate power to leaders and managers depending on circumstances. Some circumstances require management and some leadership. How much talent do we waste because we do not separate these two functions and hide behind a fiction that all people with authority have both. But even this may not mesh with our needs as members of an organization. No one wakes up in the morning to go to work with the hope that someone will manage us….We wake up in the morning to go to work with the hope that someone will lead us (a quote from Bob Chapman).
- Reading this book bothered me and it took me a while to understand why. Part of what is described here is a form of bullying. Managers of organizations are pressured by executives, financial analysts, journalists and institutional investors to maximize profits. One of the most effective forms of pressure is “benchmarking” where one company is compared to another. Many consultancies aid and abet this comparison. Combined with a competitive mindset, everyone seeks to outdo everyone else. Many of these commentators have no actual stake in the outcome and so no brake on their recommendations or comments. It is like fat/skinny shaming that pays no attention to the individual and full attention to some abstract concept. This book would have been stronger if it had included many more stories of people who stood up to the bullying on behalf of their organizations’ people.
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