A Leader's Duty | Simon Sinek

As a leader, our responsibility is to make the people feel that we have their backs and actually have their backs. So there's a sort of a nice anthropological. If you want me to go down this rabbit hole, there's a nice anthropological. I find it fascinating. There's a nice anthropological explanation which I actually explained in that book, which raises the question, why do we have leaders?

Human beings are naturally hierarchical. We self organize all the time. It's got nothing to do with whether you have formal hierarchy, like in an organization. We're constantly self organizing, like in a sports team, who's the better player. We self organize and we pay deference to the one who is better. You know, the scientist who publishes more or the Nobel laureate. All the other scientists pay deference, Right.

This is not by accident. And there's a very good anthropological reason for it going back many years. You know, human beings have only been farming for the past 10 or 12,000 years, but we existed for tens of thousands of years on the planet before that. And we lived in populations that were about 150. We maxed out at about 150, which raises a very interesting question. They lived in austere times. People are hungry. Somebody, you know, brings back some food to the tribe, we all rush in to eat. Well, if you're built like a football player, you can shove your way to the front of the line, right? But this is a bad system because if you punch me in the face this afternoon, I'm probably not going to wake you and alert you to danger tonight. And so it's just a bad system for cooperation, which is if we leave every person to themselves. And so we evolved into these hierarchical animals. We're constantly assessing and judging who's higher in the pecking order, who's the alpha of the group. And when we assess that someone is alpha to us, we naturally step back, we naturally defer and allow our alphas to eat first.

We get fed later, and I don't get an elbow in the face, right? Good system. This has survived to this modern day. There's not a single person on the planet, absolutely zero, who has any moral anger, who is offended, who is by the idea that somebody more senior in the organization makes a higher salary or gets a nicer office or a better parking space. It offends nobody. Now, we may think they're useless at their job, but the fact that they make more money than us because they're higher up in the organization offends zero. If you're senior and you leave your coat in the other room Someone will go get it for you. If you're junior and you left your coat in the other room, you get your own coat. In other words, you get treated differently. And this is why people want to get promoted, because they like the perks. But the perks don't come for free. And that's the point, which is as you make your way up the hierarchy, as you achieve that alpha status of the tribe, there's an expectation that, sure, we'll give you first choice of meat and we'll give you first choice of mate, but if danger threatens the tribe, you're going to be the one who runs headfirst towards that danger first to protect us, which means you might die first. That's why we gave you first choice of mate, because we want to keep your genes in the gene pool. We're not stupid. And it's when leaders shirk that responsibility that we start to have moral outrage. So, for example, nobody has a problem with a CEO making more money than they do. The problem we have is when you're willing to lay off your people to protect your salary, to protect your bonus, rather than find other ways to protect the people. This is what morally offends us. We made a deal. There's a deep seated anthropological deal that we've made with our Alphas that you have to protect us and you have to do what it takes, sometimes putting your own interests second.

And then you can. But if you're willing to do that, we're proud, we're happy, Go enjoy, you've earned it. And so I think this is a large part about building trust, which is it's not just about saying nice things and being trustworthy. It's that people feel that you actually have their backs and that you would be the one to take responsibility, take accountability, look for other ways to protect us if it meant we're going to get hurt.