Transcript excerpt of Simon Sinek explaining the importance of adopting an "infinite mindset" in organizations: individual leaders at any rank can choose to take responsibility for people around them, practice empathy (even toward difficult bosses), and build enduring, high-performing teams that eventually shift organizational culture ('the tail can wag the dog'). The passage advises leaving environments that cannot be influenced and emphasizes leadership as a choice, not a rank.
Chapters
What is your advice for somebody that's in a company that they don't have an infinite minded culture? Don't. Don't be there. No. Don't try and influence that which you cannot influence. Don't control that which you cannot control. You know, an infinite mindset means that is something I can't do, but I can influence and take care of the people to the left of me and to the right of me. I can take care of the people who work for me. I can, I can even take care of the person I work for. Sometimes we have a toxic boss, not because they're bad, but because we don't understand the pressure they're under sometimes to simply exhibit empathy to our boss. You know, hey, boss, you were really harsh on us today. Everything all right? What's going on? I'm worried about you. You know, I'm here, like, we can succeed together. We're here to help you. You know, if we're. No matter where we are inside an organization, leadership is not about rank or authority. Leadership is taking responsibility for the people around us. And so anybody on any team, at any rank, at any level can be a leader. The first choice is that we have to want to be. A dear friend of mine, Lieutenant General George Flynn from the Marine Corps said that the first criterion to being a leader is you have to want to be one. So any of us can volunteer to be a leader. And that's what you do. You commit yourself to seeing that the people with whom we work on a daily basis love coming to work. They feel that someone's got their back. They feel supported. They feel that they have top cover. They feel someone cares about them as a human being, listens to them, knows their story, allows them to be themselves. We can be that leader. And what you start to see is those teams become really high performing. Those teams become super tight. And you start to hear rumors across the company because everybody wants into that team because apparently it's a great team to work with, to work on. And before you know it, one of those people goes and moves to another team and they take everything that they learned because leadership has learned, and they do it for another team. And if we take that infinite mindset and eventually the tail will wag the dog. And it doesn't matter if it's this CEO or another CEO, because we will outlast whoever is in charge right now. And that's the goal. We're doing this for the good of the organization. We're doing this for the good of the cause. Right and the tail can wag the dog.
