A short YouTube excerpt where Simon Sinek argues leaders should reinforce and reward desired behaviors (initiative, demonstrating leadership traits) rather than only judging outcomes. He gives a workplace anecdote where juniors were rewarded with a promotion for initiative despite losing a pitch, and describes the Marine Corps Leadership Reaction Course, which grades exhibited leadership characteristics rather than mission success.
Chapters
If you start with why, you're going to be more inspiring, right? It's also a recruiting tool. It's a reinforcement tool when you're in. But. But remember, you're there to see your people grow. Think of them like, like. Like your children, right? Find out where they're strong, encourage them and, and. And catch them doing things right. We so often catch people doing things wrong, right? Catch people doing things right. Reinforce the behaviors you want rather than constantly punishing the behaviors you don't want. Change your incentive structures to get the behaviors you want. I'll give you. So this happened to me very young in my career. I worked at a big ad agency early in my career, and new business pitches were usually done by the senior people. And it was Christmas time, so all the senior people went off to vacation. We had a big pitch sometime in January, and I was left back at the office because I didn't have vacation. And they told me and another junior person, prepare the war room. Which, I apologize, as a Marine, it basically means hang the research on the walls, right? Well, that took an hour and we had a week to kill. So we decided to do the whole pitch ourselves. We did the strategy, we combed through the research. We came up with an insight. We wrote the whole pitch deck. And the senior leaders came back, we showed them our work, and they actually used our deck in the new business pitch. And we lost the business. We did not win the pitch. And my boss gave me a huge promotion. They moved me up two levels because he wasn't rewarding my outcome, he was rewarding my initiative. And guess what? He got more of initiative. You know, this is a Marine. I learned this when I went to OCS and watched them do the lrc.
Basically, this leadership reaction court, Leadership reaction course, these mini obstacle courses, right? And I stand next to the drill instructor when they have to do these things. Timed like, take all your men and materiel over the water hazard, which is what Marines call a pond.
With, like, planks of different wood, three of different sizes wood, you know, and nowhere on the grading list. Nowhere on the grading list does it say if they made it to the other side or not. And I asked the drill instructor, how come you don't care if they have mission success? He says, well, we understand that good leaders sometimes suffer mission failure and bad leaders sometimes enjoy mission success. So if they succeed or fail doesn't tell us what kind of leader they are. We said, well, then how do you know what kind of leader they are? They said, if they're exhibiting the characteristics of a good leader. And so they, you know this. You get drilled into you the characteristics of what it means to be a good leader. And individual mission successes don't necessarily matter because they know, the Marines know that if you reward the good behaviors that you want to see repeated, good leaders will enjoy mission success more often over time. And that's the point. More often over time. But if we just ding people every time they fail, we're going to get nothing out of them.
