Short transcript of Simon Sinek discussing mindset around goals and how organizations reward outcomes. Sinek argues that arbitrary target dates and single-point metrics encourage short-term, potentially unethical behaviors; leaders should evaluate trend data and reward consistent effort and healthy team dynamics rather than only final results.
Chapters
When you're trying to build trusting teams, you recognize that you cannot enforce certainty on people. You can offer goals. People like goals. But what's important is how we get there, not just that we got there. Think of it like trying to lose weight, right? There's nothing wrong with setting arbitrary goals with arbitrary dates, which is, by the way, how we build our businesses. We want to hit X amount of dollars in revenue by probably the end of the year because that's when we pay taxes. It's a completely arbitrary number. Somebody might say, we could do better than that. You're like, you're right. And then we change the number. Right. Complaint works of fiction. So we're striving to hit a work of fiction, right?
And it's the same when we want to lose weight. I want to lose X amount of pounds by X date. Arbitrary. Right. And we're doing all the things to do that we're exercising, eating well, all the things we love standing on the scale. We love a metric. There's nothing wrong with that. Human beings need that. We can't run in a marathon without mile markers. It's actually unnerving. We need to know how fast and how far so the metrics are good. And let's say you hit your goal. You hit your performance goal, just as you had articulated. Amazing. You feel incredible. You feel like you've succeeded. Here's the problem. You have to keep exercising for the rest of your life. In other words, you don't stop doing the things that you were doing. So the game hasn't ended. It was simply a waypoint. But what I think is more interesting is what happens if you miss your goal? What happens if you don't lose the amount of weight that you wanted on that date? And the answer is, nothing. Nothing happens because you're probably way healthier than you are now than you were. You're probably on the easily. You can see the trend data. You can see you're well on your way to hitting your goal. You just picked the wrong date. You're easily going to hit it in another month if you just stick to your regime. But business is the same, which is sometimes we miss our goals. But the question is, what's the trend data? Is the team working well together? Is morale high? Is some of it out of our control? Market conditions and things like that, things we didn't know about. And so if we happen to miss the number, the problem is, how are we rewarding our people? And so many of us only reward our people based on if they hit the number. But what if they're begging, borrowing and stealing? What if they simply rush at the end of the quarter to drop their prices or have some sort of promotion or have some trickery? They'll hit the number and then we bonus them which tells everybody else I don't care how you hit your numbers as long as you hit them well guess what kind of behavior that's going to reinforce inside our organization. Whereas if you look at the data, the trend data and you reward somebody who's well on the path, what we're telling you is as long as you're doing a good job you'll do well in this organization. Leaders understand that they are not responsible for the results. They are responsible for the people who are responsible for the results. And that skill set is very, very different than just trying to get people to do the thing that you know how to do better than them because you've been doing it your whole life.
