Simon Sinek argues that organizations must intentionally design their culture around their "why" rather than let it happen by accident. He breaks down specific skills: how to give feedback without the compliment sandwich, how to start difficult conversations with honest language, and how to listen so leaders can address sensitive topics like race and performance.
Chapters
You can either have a culture by default or by design. And most people think about cultures. Most business leaders think about culture usually after something bad happens or when they're struggling with something, or they, They're. They're. They're hiring, but nothing seems to work out. Ask yourself what kind of culture you want, and it's going to be based on your. Why. I wanted my culture to be a place that is inspiring to come and work at my. At my company, and, and that we want to do work that inspires other people. That's. That's why I get out of bed in the morning, right? And again it goes. It's like. It's like parenting. No one will ever. You'll never be an expert at this. It's 1% better every day. I'll give you one example. So most of us give feedback the way we like to get it, or we take the advice from people on stages like this. You know, given a compliment sandwich. You know, tell them the good, then tell them the bad and tell me to tell them the good. Don't ever give me a compliment sandwich, okay? I hate them because you tell me some bullshit at the beginning, then you tell me the real thing, and then you tell me some bullshit at the end, and I'm supposed to receive it better that way, right? But the problem is I like blunt feedback, so I tend to give blunt feedback. Turns out not everybody likes blunt feedback.
So I had a team member, a colleague that I worked with, that I would give her blunt feedback in the moment because, heck, that's how I like to get it. And I tell you, sometimes screaming matches ensued, right? Like we would have screaming matches over me giving her feedback. And at one point, I'm realizing it's going nowhere, and I interrupt, I go, this is not working clearly. Can you please tell me how to give you feedback? Because clearly I'm failing. And she said, yes, I just need to be prepared. So ask me, can I give you some feedback? Or schedule a time with me and tell me it's going to be a feedback session and I can put it in my calendar. I said, I can do that. So I started scheduling it. Or I started saying, can I give you some difficult feedback now? And she would say, yes. And I could be completely blunt. And she could take harsher feedback than almost anybody on the team, so long as I prepared her for it. And so we have to learn how to give and receive feedback, things like that. The point is there are these skills, listening skills, how to have difficult conversations. This is a skill of good culture. I saw this happen after the murder of George Floyd. Right. The number of leaders after George Floyd. You know what they did with their teams? Nothing. They did nothing. Not because they're bad people. It's because they were so afraid of talking to their team about race that they would accidentally trigger someone or inflame the situation that they opted to do nothing. This is because they lack the skill set of how to have a difficult conversation. Let me teach you how to have a difficult conversation. I need to have a difficult conversation with you. I'm worried I'm going to get some of this wrong, but I need you to work with me. I may say things wrong. I may accidentally trigger somebody, but having this conversation right now is more important than me getting it perfectly right. Can we have that conversation? And now you've just enrolled people to say we're going to have a difficult conversation together, and we're not all going to get it right. And by the way, if you can learn the skill of how to have a conversation about race, for example, you can have a conversation about pretty much anything, performance or anything else that's going on in your team.
