Simon Sinek explores how leaders can inspire cooperation, trust and change. He’s the author of the global bestseller, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, which explores his idea of the Golden Circle, what he calls “a naturally occurring pattern, grounded in the biology of human decision making, that explains why we are inspired by some people, leaders, messages and organizations over others.” His latest work, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, explores “circles of safety,” and how to enhance feelings of trust and confidence in making bold decisions.
Sinek is also an adjunct of the RAND Corporation. He writes and comments regularly for major publications and teaches graduate-level strategic communications at Columbia University.
How Leaders Emerge
Inc. features editor, Diana Ransom, recently interviewed Sinek. He explains why great leaders need to give their employees the space and responsibility to grow. He says leaders emerge from excelling in entry roles before learning how to lead others.
“Leadership is a skill,” says Sinek. He continues that, “leadership is a practicable skill and its rarely taught unfortunately. Leadership is this really really sophisticated change in mindset. When we’re very junior the only thing we have to do is be good at our jobs and they [leaders] teach us how to use the software, how to use the technology so we can get good at our jobs.”
“And if you’re really good at your job, they’ll promote you,” continues Sinek. “And you’ll eventually get promoted to a position where you are now responsible for people who do the job you used to do, but nobody teaches us how to do that. This is why we get managers because the people who are in charge of us are actually better at the job than we are because that’s what got them promoted. Then we have to go through this transition where we are no longer responsible for the results, we are responsible for the people who are responsible for the results.”
View the full video here:
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