Simon Sinek argues that anyone can drive organizational change by adopting an infinite mindset, regardless of rank. Build trust, define your team's just cause, study worthy rivals, and ask why processes exist. A grassroots team transformed a 100,000-person organization in two years without senior leadership's support.
Chapters
So the most common question I used to get was what about these millennials? And I did a thing, I did a video and answered that and that question went away. Which is kind of good. The most common question that I get now, every single time, the most common question is, what if I believe in the infinite mindset and senior leadership is so finite minded, what do I do? Well, if we adjust to an infinite mindset, we accept that a, we can't affect, we can't change people, right? We can only change our own behavior. We can't force senior leadership to change, especially if we have no direct contact with them. But we can choose to become the leaders we wish we had, right? So the whole idea is say, is to, is to work within the system you've got, of course, but to say, okay, we're going to build an infinite minded team and so amongst the people you work with, and it doesn't matter if you're in a leadership position or not, remember, leadership has nothing to do with rank. Leadership is the responsibility to take care of those around us. So you can take care of your boss too. Hey boss, you okay? During this Covid, how are you?
And start embracing those, those practices. You know, if the organization doesn't have a good just cause, tell your team what your just causes and say why you love this job and how this job is helping you advance your just cause. Start building trusting teams. Start making the people you work with feel like someone has their back, that someone cares about them as human beings, that you create a space where they can be open and honest without judgment.
You study your worthy rivals so that you can be a better leader. But also ask the team what other teams inside the company are better than we are so that at certain things so that we can be become an even better team. Not because we want to beat them, but because we want to improve. Build that sense of, of constant improvement into the team. Be willing to change certain things. You know, very often companies do things because that's the way they've always been done. But nobody's ever asked, does it have to be done this way? And nobody ever asks, can I change it? And very often the answer is we don't know why it's done this way. And yes, you can change it. Ask the questions. I tell you one quick funny story as a side about asking questions. Long ago when I had a job, I worked at a large ad agency and it was a fairly common experience where my boss would come into my office and say, the client wants this by Wednesday. Get it done. I'd be like, it's impossible to get this done by Wednesday. And he would say, I don't know what to tell you, you have to get. The client wants it by Wednesday. So one day I called the client and I said, hey, I got this thing that you asked for, when do you need it by? Because they said you have to have it by Wednesday. And they went, no, I can have it by Friday or Monday, that's totally fine. It's because somebody said, when do you want it? They said Wednesday. And we went okay. And then it became the point is, ask a question. Sometimes we have more flexibility and more freedom than we think we do. And then what ends up happening is you build this wonderful high performing team. If you have an open minded group of leaders, even if they're finite minded, they're going to look at what you're doing in your high performing team with higher loyalty, better relationships and they're going to say what are you guys doing down there? And they may want to learn from you. If they're completely just in their own world and short term metric driven, they'll just leave you alone because you're high performing. And eventually some of the people will leave that group and go join other teams. They'll either move on or get promoted out and they'll bring everything they've learned and they'll take it to those teams and they'll build high performing, infinite minded teams and eventually the tail wags the dog. Unfortunately, we don't know how long it takes. Depends on the organization, depends on the culture, depends on the people. But the tail can wag the dog. I saw it happen with 100,000 person organization and it took two years, which I think is unbelievably quickly and it was completely without senior leadership's help. We saw the whole organization pivot just because the people started to embrace new ideas.
