A short talk by Simon Sinek on leadership and building organizational culture. Sinek argues leadership is everyone's responsibility (not only top-down), emphasizes personal ownership of shared workspaces and behaviors (examples: Gordon Bethune at Continental Airlines; UPS vs. USPS vehicle care), and recommends empathy—listening, supporting colleagues, and encouraging additive contributions to culture.
Chapters
So one of the things that I think is misunderstood about leadership is that it's not just from the top. Leaders have to set. Set the environment, for sure. And leaders have to lead by example, for sure. But, you know, this is our organization. This is your organization. Like, you don't get to. Nobody gets to sit on the sidelines and be like, all right, what have you done for me lately? Right. You know, I don't even mind negativity. You know. You know, people like, oh, my goodness, that person. Such a negative Nelly. But because sometimes negative people who are in the fight and they're still willing to, they show up every day. They're great.
It's when people are negative and they just stand on the sides and throw stones. And I don't mean, like, bring me solutions. That's not what I mean. I mean, just like, you're in it, you're in the scrum, and you're willing to be a part of it. So you have to come to work here every day. There's a great story. When Gordon Bethune took over Continental Airlines, which existed prior to United, they merged, it was a terrible airline. It was the worst rated airline in the country for every metric. And one of the things that was bad was the planes were always dirty and the customers would always complain and they would always get yelled at by management, clean the planes for the customer. The customers are complaining. And when Gordon Bethune showed up, he said, forget about the customer. They're on the plane. They're off the plane in three hours. You have to do four. You're going to have to do four more flights because before your shift is done, why don't you clean the plane for yourselves? This is your office. Why don't you keep it nice for yourself? In fact, there's a funny statistic between UPS trucks and US Postal Service trucks, which is US Postal Service trucks. I think they only last about two years before they have to be replaced. And UPS trucks last something like five years before they have to get replaced. Ups, they clean their trucks every single day. And US Postal Service trucks, they clean their trucks once a week. Because when you give somebody something really nice to work in, they look after it. And so it becomes incumbent upon all of us to say, this is when we're talking about leadership, which is, if you see someone struggling, go to them. If you see someone who's unhappy, maybe go to them. If somebody's stuck in a false narrative, maybe help them change their narrative. Give them a safe space to feel heard. Sometimes people just need to empty their bucket. Some people sometimes just need to vent and get it all out, and then they're actually fine. And sometimes what we do by mistake is try and interrupt them, correct the facts, fix the problem. And so we can be that. Like, you can be that for the people you work with. That's a huge part of it. Like taking responsibility for the organization in which you work. Yes, leadership does bear some responsibility, of course, but I think everybody in the organization is included in that as well. We want people not to just fit the culture, but to be additive and contribute to the culture.
