Simon Sinek argues you cannot directly change senior leaders' viewpoints; instead, focus on being the leader you wish you had. Leadership is distinct from rank/authority and is practiced by committing to support teammates (seeing, hearing, helping goals, having their back). Small-team practices compound over time to influence culture — but this requires a long-term, disciplined regimen (analogy: brushing teeth).
You cannot change their point of view, Right. No number of anonymously sent books will change their mind. Right. Though I encourage you to keep trying.
You know, no angry conversations or meetings will change. It's just not going to happen. All right? And so you're barking up the wrong tree, right? It's not about how do I change my leader, it's how do I be the leader I wish I had. Leadership has nothing to do with rank. Rank affords you authority. That's it. But it doesn't make you a leader. Right? Leadership is the awesome responsibility to see those around us rise. And if you have rank, if you have authority, you can just lead at scale. And so what you want to do is be the leader you wish you had and you were not going to change somebody 2, 3, 4 levels up who disagrees and doesn't, who ignores all of the stuff that I'm talking about, right? Like we've lost them, right? Or they'll come, they'll have their come to Jesus moan in a different way, right? Which sometimes happens. But if you lead, if you are the leader you wish you had, and this is why I want to see young people, if they go through discomfort or they have a leader who's they don't buy into, please don't quit, right? Please stay there and practice the difficult, magical, wonderful, honorable skill of leadership with your team. Even if you're the most junior person, you have somebody to the left of you and you have somebody to the right of you. And you can commit to seeing that they feel seen, heard and understood. You can commit to helping them achieve their goals. You can commit to making them feel like someone has their back in difficult times. You can commit to helping them and you can commit to helping ensure that when they go home at the end of the day that they feel fulfilled and they had a good day at work. That's called leadership. And when you start to find is if you can do that, you can develop that skill set, that these little teams start to be higher performing, they start to get along better. The teaming starts to happen really well and leadership will either ignore you because you're doing fine, or they may surprise you and be like, what are they doing down there? I'm really curious. They may actually come and learn from you and eventually one of you is going to get promoted out of that group and go to another team and they're going to take all the skills they learned from you and they're going to bring them to their new team and now you're going to have Two high performing, wonderful teams that are highly trusting and magical. And then three, and then five, and then 10. Before you know it, the tail wags the dog. And this is one of the hardest things I think young people struggle with, which is we're talking about a long term mindset. We're talking about an infinite mindset here, which is the speed at which it takes for the tail to wag the dog is unpredictable. The reason a lot of businesses ignore all of my work is not because it's wrong or they disagree. It's because they want it to work on the day they want it to work. Which is the exact same thing as saying to me, simon, I'm exercising and I need to be healthy on this exact day, on this exact time. I'm like, I mean, maybe it'll work out that way. You know, it's like every doctor will tell you if you work out 20 minutes a day for the rest of your life, you're going to be super healthy, right? But on what day you're healthy, on what day your blood, you know, your blood pressure gets better, Nobody knows. Sometimes quick, sometimes slow, I don't know. But you have to commit to the process. And 100% of the time the process works. I just don't know when. And leadership is the same. A hundred percent, it works. I just don't know when. And people come quickly and people come slowly. So you may convert an entire organization in a year, or you may just simply build the momentum that it'll continue without you, but you won't get to see it change. That's possible, too.
But the most important thing is to commit to the regime. Like brushing your teeth. Brushing your teeth every day. Brushing your teeth does nothing unless you do it all the time, every day. Can I take a night off? Yes, you can. It won't do any damage. How many nights can I take off? I don't know. And neither does any dentist. Just not too many, Right? Same thing. Commit to the regime. Be the leader you wish you had. Don't worry about convincing other people.
