Leadership vs. Authority | Simon Sinek

So leadership and authority are not the same thing. Title affords you. Authority affords you rank, right? But that doesn't make you a leader. I know many people who sit at high levels of organizations who are not leaders. We do as they tell us because they have authority over us, but we don't trust them and wouldn't follow them anywhere. And we. I know many people at low levels of organizations that have no formal rank, no formal authority, but they've made the choice to look after the person to the left of them and take care of the person to the right of them, and we would trust them and follow them anywhere. And so rank affords you the opportunity to lead at scale. It affords you the opportunity to take care of more people, implement systems and. And incentive structures and all the rest of it and reward behaviors.

You can influence culture with rank, but that doesn't make you a leader. And you still have to study.

The tenets of leadership. And when they align, it's magical. When you have rank and you've been studying leadership, then you can actually affect the culture in a more robust way. And. And one of the primary responsibilities of any leader is to make more leaders. And you can do that at scale if you have authority.

I always assume that leaders die.

You know, leaders move on, they retire, they quit, whatever. They leave. And so we cannot. It would be a very weak movement if it was driven only by the force of personality of one or a few people who will inevitably move on. And so the more that people feel like the movement belongs to them, the more initiative they take to keep it alive.

When the leader leads.

So, yeah, a movement has to belong to the people. You know, civil rights didn't belong to Martin Luther King. He did a very good job of articulating the vision better than most, but it wasn't his, it was ours. It was those who believed in the same vision, who it belonged to. And the more a vision is shared, the more a just cause is shared, the more likely it is to survive and thrive well, well, well beyond any individual.

Everyone has the choice to be the leader they wish they had. You know, leadership has a capacity. Like being a parent is a capacity, like everyone can do it. Not everyone should do it, not everyone wants to do it, but everybody can do it. And so is the choice if somebody likes coming to work and just, you know, getting their job done and going home, at the end of the day, we. I have no gripe with that, you know, And I still have the same expectations that they become a trustworthy, productive member of the team that they look out for the people around them. But anyone who chooses to be a leader which has nothing to do with rank which simply means that I will invest time and energy to learn the skills to look after the people around me even the people above me to express empathy and concern and care. But to go back to your question about self doubt.

Like a parent to a child one of our jobs is to help them build confidence and one of the ways we help them build confidence is to let them try, let them fail and let them try again and let them learn the lesson that I can do this rather than swooping in and always doing it for them. And because of the pressures of you know financial pressures and whatever pressures are put upon us by our organizations sometimes people in leadership positions say I don't have time for that. Yes sometimes it does take time and this is where I think an infinite mindset is very very very helpful.