What We Can Learn About Optimism & Leadership from Simon Sinek
What We Can Learn About Optimism & Leadership from Simon Sinek
Posted On: Tuesday, December 13, 2016
“A good leader doesn’t only inspire us to have confidence in what they can do. A great leader inspires us to have confidence in what we can do.” Together is Better: A Little Book of Inspiration (Simon Sinek, 2016)
The adage “what we focus on, we get more of” is as true in leadership as anything. And, conversely, when we don’t focus on the right things, crises inevitably occur.
Leadership expert Simon Sinek refers to himself as an optimist. He studies and writes about what makes great leaders. He talks about vision, purpose, service and the “why” behind leadership: perhaps best known for his 2009
TED Talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” (which has had over 29 million views so far).
The cautionary tales of leadership gone wrong, like Wells Fargo’s current ethics crisis, are very troubling but don’t necessarily inspire us to be better leaders. Perhaps because we don’t see ourselves making the same choices. (And yet, too often those choices are made.) Sinek, in his new book, Together is Better, offers a fable of how optimism is possible — for leaders who want to make their leadership count as well as anyone seeking more meaning in their professional and personal lives.
The story line is simple and mirrors workplace challenges. The one or two sentence observations on life and leadership often fit the number of characters in a Twitter tweet. For example, “A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.” This wisdom may be dismissed as obvious. However, not so obvious to the number of leaders who talk about their people as a team (as former Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO John Stumpf did in his testimony before The U.S. Senate Banking Committee) when their team doesn’t trust each other or the company. Also consider how often leaders don’t realize trust is absent because they aren’t focused on ensuring trust is earned and present.
The leadership fable has nearly 50 Sinek observations that invite deeper consideration. He’s integrated and distilled themes from his work — including finding a vision, innovation, passion versus stress, success and what inspires — and put them into a tale that demonstrates how to take a leadership journey together rather than alone.
The vision, he explains in the preface, that drives him (and the fable) is that people working together “… build a world in which the vast majority of us wake up every single morning inspired to go to work, feel safe when we’re there and return home fulfilled at the end of the day.”
“What good is having a belly if there is no fire in it?” Sinek asks. “Wake up, drink your passion, light a match and get to work!”
The end of the year, and the beginning of the next, offer another window for self-reflection. An opportunity to turn the focus to our own leadership and consider what we stand for and what we are doing about it. Sinek’s fable and observations invite a focus on what enables our leadership to be more open to inspiration from those around us, as well as being more inspiring to others. It’s a catalyst for optimism.
Gael O’Brien is a catalyst for leaders leading with purpose and impact. She is an executive coach with a corporate and public affairs background. Gael is President of Strategic Opportunities Group.
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We recently had Gael O’Brien speak to us at the Network of Enterprising Women and she gave an outstanding talk on ethics in the workplace and how we might meet it head on. I highly recommend listening to her or inviting her to speak at your venue.