Simon Sinek explains that employees stay or leave based primarily on how they feel about their jobs — love and loyalty matter more than money alone. He argues companies should invest in "human" (not "soft") skills like listening, which support personal growth and strengthen employee commitment; when employees feel seen and heard they may negotiate to stay. Sinek also cites WD-40 as an admired example of company culture.
Chapters
We don't have to like our jobs every day, but we do get to love our jobs every day. It's like, you don't like your children every day, but you love your children every day. So having a hard day, you know, that's fine. But the question is, what do we fall in love with? And at the end of the day, the reason that we stay or leave a job is because of how we feel about that job. You know, I think we misunderstand when we think people just leave for money. If they just leave for money, then they never really had strong feelings at the company in the first place. Right? Because when people feel loyal to the company, they turn down jobs that offer them more money. Or if it's so tempting and the numbers are so high, then they go to their company and say, listen, I was offered this job. It's very tempting. There's a lot of pressure, but I don't want to leave. Is there anything you can do to help me stay? Right. And the point is, they're open about it. And what makes people want to have that conversation, like I said, is that they're seen and heard. The best companies have all kinds of programs inside the company to help the person grow as an individual. Now, we talked about listening skills and these kinds of things. These are valuable for the work that we do. But it turns out that those skills also help us as parents. They help us as spouses or as boyfriends and as girlfriends. These are invaluable skills in life.
Um, and I think that we forget that we talk about hard skills and soft skills as if those things are opposite. It's a terrible. I hate the term soft skills, hard skills and human skills. And the more that we invest in human skills, in addition to the hard skills that we're teaching, the more people feel like they're growing as individuals. I'm a better version of myself now than I was when I started at this company, because the company is actually helping me on a. In personal growth.
WD40, which is a company that I admire, their culture, the lubricant company.
They train their managers to be coaches. So literally, like executive coaching, training, that kind of thing. But they train their own people to have that skill set so that they're equipped to help their people who have challenges. And especially with younger generation, the younger generation is asking companies to provide everything. You know, we want to have our sense of belonging, our sense of community, our sense of personal growth, our sense of purpose to come from work. It didn't used to be like that 40 years ago. And so. And so there's a huge pressure on companies. And so I think what entices people into the company and into the industry is not just come and do cybersecurity. You know, there's a percentage of people who are, you know, de facto interested in that, but rather tell them the kind of experience they're going to have, tell them what they get from the company, and you'll find it remarkable how many people will all of a sudden be interested in the category in the. Because of what they get holistically, not just what they get from the product.
