Transcript of a short Simon Sinek talk arguing that leaders should aim to inspire rather than merely motivate. He contrasts motivation (carrots and sticks) with inspiration (pursuit of something larger than oneself) and outlines three leadership responsibilities: articulate a vision, communicate it well, and show empathy toward people.
Chapters
I like to think that our job.
As leaders is not to motivate people, but to inspire them. I believe in hiring motivated people and then giving them something to work towards. We can motivate people all kinds of ways with carrots and sticks, incentives or disincentives. But inspiration is something different.
It's the pursuit of something larger than.
Ourselves, feeling like we're a community, feeling like we're doing something together.
And you can see this. The most successful organizations will. We look to our colleagues and our co workers and we trust each other. We feel like we have to do this together compared to an organization where there's poor leadership and it's only external.
Motivations like money or bonuses, and everybody.
Sort of is in it for themselves. They may like each other, but they're not incentivized or desired to help each other. So that is the job of leadership. Leadership is responsible for inspiring the people. So there's multiple things.
Number one, vision.
Where are you going? It's like trying to get people to get into a car with you, but.
Not telling them where we're going.
You're more likely to get them to get in the car if you tell them where you're going. Vision is where we want to take the organization in terms other than success or customer service, anything like that. But literally, how do we imagine a world that doesn't exist?
This is what vision is. That's why we call it vision. We can see it in our imaginations.
Another part of it is the ability to communicate. Believe it or not, communication is a huge part of good leadership. We're social animals. The way we express love or friendship is with words. And so too, good leaders find words that capture their vision, but also make people feel seen and heard. And then that's the third thing.
Empathy.
People are human beings.
We all want to be seen, heard, understood.
We all want to feel like we're part of something bigger than ourselves. We want to be seen as human beings.
