Written By: Taimoor15
Leaders fascinates me.
Over the years, I’ve found that the leaders that I admire are inspiring, selfless and optimistic.
It excites me that leaders always have something to teach — directly or indirectly.
It’s not just about what they say, it’s also about the way they do things and interact with people.
I strive to learn more about leaders, leadership and what makes a great leader.
Last week, while I took a break from writing and reading, I searched the internet to find something new to learn. I stumbled across some videos from a very popular speaker, one of my favorites, Simon Sinek.
You may have heard of him from his TED talk that went viral a few years ago — Start With Why-How great leaders inspire action
If you’re interested in exploring leadership and what makes a great leader, the video below is for you. You will love it. Before you continue reading what I learned from him, first, take the time to watch Simon speak — Simon really knows how to captivate an audience.
Takeaways
Remember watching educational videos in school and just not recalling what the hell you were supposed to learn from it, just a day later?
I don’t want that to ever happen again.
Here I am sharing with you my takeaways from Simon.
By summarizing what I learnt, I can commit these learnings to my memory. I’ve found that to be one of the most effective ways to learn anything. Either teaching someone or summarizing it in your own words.
I’m only summarizing here — there’s a lot to learn from the talk — but I hope it can bring some value to you and encourage you to explore more on leadership.
1. Create a Thriving Environment
“It’s not just about telling people about what we need to get done, it’s about creating an environment where trust and cooperation can thrive”
When we feel safe amongst our own, the natural human reaction is trust.
You can’t instruct someone to trust you.
You can’t order two people to work with each other.
It just doesn’t work like that.
Trust and cooperation are feelings derived from being in an environment where the leaders make us feel safe.
Why is trust and cooperation so important? Easy. They’re important because we depend on each other to survive and get things done.
We must remember that we have no control over the external factors impacting our organizations. What we can control though, is the internal environment and conditions that we operate in. Leaders are responsible for making us feel safe in these environments so that we can be ourselves, care for the people to the left and right of us and excel in our day to day roles.
On the other hand, if we create the wrong environment our people will protect themselves from the organization. If leaders can’t make us feel safe, we have no choice but to make ourselves feel safe. That’s when we don’t look out for anybody else, we only look to protect our own interests.
In the wrong environments feelings of mistrust, paranoia, and self-interest are born. When this happens, undeniably the company and the customer suffers!
2. Sacrifice For Your Tribe
“Leaders by the very definition are the ones who are willing to sacrifice their interests to save the lives of the people in their tribe”
If you take care of the people in your organization, the people in your organization will take care of the cause you’re trying to advance.
It feels good to be the king, right?
We give our leaders preferential treatment so that when we are in danger, our leaders will sacrifice for us. We’re okay with paying these leaders with higher salaries, better perks and bigger offices for that exact reason — we expect them to take care of us when their’s an overarching problem.
Great leaders are the ones that would sacrifice their interests to take care of those around them, and never sacrifice those around them to take care of themselves
We hate it when we hear a high up bank executive received $15 million in bonuses. Why? It’s because we know that those ‘leaders’ sacrificed their people for their bonuses. Contrastingly, a great leader would sacrifice the numbers for their people.
Leaders are those who give time and effort to save the people in their organisation.
3. Be The Leader You Wish You Had
“And if we ask them why are you giving such blood, sweat and tears? Why would you bother sacrificing for that person or this cause? They will look you in the eyes and say, “because they would do it for me”,”
Leadership doesn’t have to start from the top.
Leaders aren’t defined by a position, rank or title.
Leadership actually starts with the person to the left of you and the person to the right of you.
Creating that safe environment for our organizations, starts with you and me.
A safe environment where you can be yourself, work for the common vision set by the leaders and invite those outside the tribe (customers, colleagues, friends) to experience the conditions the safe environment entails.
That’s the type of leader I want to be —
The type of leader that makes people feel safe and be themselves,
The type of leader that builds strong relationships,
The type of leader that puts others before himself,
The type of leader that generates confidence in people to do their best work.
