How Honesty Transforms Teams: Simon Sinek's Leadership Tips

We're there to see those around us rise. That's what leadership is. So if you want people to be honest about their shortcomings so that you can help them train up, we have to be honest about ours, right? About our shortcomings. One of the greatest things that I ever did was open up to my team about the things I'm struggling with, the days that I'm having a hard day. If I'm in a bad place, I ask my team to be patient with me. And it turns out the more risks that I took to be open, the more risks my team took to be open to me. So if I talked about a skill set I didn't have or where I suck, then they told me where they suck, and I could be there to support them. And more important, they see me doing it for others. So are we yelling at people when they get things wrong? Are we saying, all right, try again? How are we responding when things go wrong? I remember I had a boss named Peter Entomaggio. The best boss I ever had in my life. Annoyingly, he would never answer a single question. Sorry. Yeah, he would never answer a single question. I'd ask him something, and he'd say, well, what do you think we should do? I'd be like, I think we should do this. He goes, well, why don't you try that? And.

If I screwed something up, he expected us to be fully accountable. He expected us to walk into his office and say, I screwed up, and you never got yelled at. He said, okay, so what are you going to do to fix it? And because we didn't get yelled at, we were encouraged to be honest, and we were rewarded for being honest. In other words, he held space for us. He was supportive in us trying to fix something. We never feared for losing our jobs if we screwed something up. And I screwed some big things up, but he was just there to support us. And so the more that we felt that, the more not only risks were we willing to take, which is good, but the more we took full accountability. So sometimes I think we have young people come into our practices or come into our companies, and we expect them to be us, or we expect them to have been raised the same way we were raised. They were raised differently. It's a different time. It's a different generation. It's not better or worse. It's just different. And so a little bit of empathy and a little bit of support goes a long way.