Simon Sinek explains why military teams display extraordinary trust: leaders create environments where people feel safe enough to be trustworthy. Trust isn't a value you post on a wall. It's built when leaders write values as verbs and set conditions that make trust biologically possible.
Chapters
I was going through a period in my own career where I was struggling to trust people and didn't know who to trust. And I know trust is important. Everybody keeps telling us trust is important, but they don't tell us what trust is or how it's built simultaneously. I just happened to be spending time with folks in uniform, with folks in the military, and I kept meeting these people who would willingly risk their lives to save the lives of people they didn't even like. Whereas in business, you know, we don't even want to give up credit for things, let alone our lives. I started asking the question, how do I get people like that at work? And my original theory was that they're just better people. And better people are drawn to this life of service, which is why you find a disproportionately high number of these high trusting, high sacrificed people. And the more I started to learn, the more I started to investigate, the more I realized I was completely wrong. It's not actually about the person. It's about the environment. You can take a good person and put them in a bad environment, and they will do bad things. Conversely, you can take someone who may have been perceived as untrustworthy, change their environment, and they can change their lives and become valuable members of a team. And who's responsible for setting the environment? Leaders. Leaders set the environment. So if you can create environment biologically, trust will follow. Trust for me, is a tricky one. When we put it on the wall as value, because we can't instruct people to trust. And values have to be things we do. I like when values are written as verbs, you know, it's not innovate. You can't, like, walk into someone's office and say, please innovate, you know, but you can say, think of the problem differently. You know, honesty. You can't put honesty on the wall. It's tell the truth. And trust is one of those weird ones, because trust is a result. You know, you can't tell people, trust me, it doesn't really work that way. In fact, the least trustworthy people are the ones who tell you that they're the most trustworthy. What generates trust is when we actively work to make others feel safe, the result is trust. So trust is value. Though not intellectually wrong. It's very hard to execute because you can't tell people to trust. It's not an instruction. And I'm a great believer that, as I said, the best values are often written as actions, as verbs, because you can tell people you can do them. You can hold people accountable to them, and you can even measure them and build incentive structures around them.
