Leaders Eat Last Continued

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Leaders Eat Last

Sinek turned to United States Marine Corps to explain the importance of leaders being focused on their people. He recognized their strong culture and shared values, teamwork, trust among team members, and perhaps most importantly, how they acknowledge the importance of people and relationships to their mission success.

When you are with Marines gathering to eat, you will notice that the most junior are served first and the most senior are served last.

Marine leaders are expected to eat last because the true price of leadership is the willingness to place the needs of others above your own. Great leaders truly care about those they are privileged to lead and understand that the true cost of the leadership privilege comes at the expense of self-interest.

If people in an organization feel safe among each other, they will work together to achieve things none of them could have ever achieved alone. The result is that their organization towers over their competitors.  To see money as subordinate to people and not the other way around is fundamental to creating a culture in which the people naturally pull together to advance the business. And it is the ability to grow one’s people to do what needs to be done that creates stable, lasting success. It is not the genius at the top giving directions that makes people great. It is great people that make the guy at the top look like a genius.

By creating a Circle of Safety around the people in the organization, leadership reduces the threats people feel inside the group, which frees them up to focus more time and energy to protect the organization from the constant dangers outside and seize the big opportunities. Without a Circle of Safety, people are forced to spend too much time and energy protecting themselves from each other.  Strong leaders extend the Circle of Safety to include every single person who works for the organization. Self-preservation is unnecessary and fiefdoms are less able to survive.

Researchers found that workers’ stress was not caused by a higher degree of responsibility and pressure usually associated with rank. It is not the demands of the job that cause the most stress, but the degree of control workers feel they have throughout their day. The studies also found that the effort required by a job is not in itself stressful, but rather the imbalance between the effort we give and the reward we feel. Put simply: less control, more stress.  Leaders, the study showed, have overall lower stress levels than those who work for them.  The lower someone’s rank in the organizational hierarchy, the greater their risk of stress-related health problems, not the other way around.

A supportive and well-managed work environment is good for one’s health. Those who feel they have more control, who feel empowered to make decisions instead of waiting for approval, suffer less stress.  The responsibility of a leader is to provide cover from above for their people who are working below. When the people feel that they have the control to do what’s right, even if it sometimes means breaking the rules, then they will more likely do the right thing. Courage comes from above. Our confidence to do what’s right is determined by how trusted we feel by our leaders.

Leaders are the ones who are willing to give up something of their own for us. Their time, their energy, their money, maybe even the food off their plate. When it matters, leaders choose to eat last.

When a leader is able to personally know everyone in the group, the responsibility for their care becomes personal. The leader starts to see those for whom they are responsible as if they were their own family.  In a Marine platoon of about forty people, for example, they will often refer to the officer as “our” lieutenant. Whereas the more distant and less seen senior officer is simply “the” colonel.

As Goethe, the great nineteenth-century thinker, reportedly summed up, “You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”

Captain David Marquet (author of Turn the Ship Around!) points out, “Those at the top have all the authority and none of the information. Those at the bottom,” he continues, “have all the information and none of the authority. Not until those without information relinquish their control can an organization run better, smoother and faster and reach its maximum potential.”

The role of the leader is not to bark commands and be completely accountable for the success or failure of the mission. It is a leader’s job instead to take responsibility for the success of each member of his crew. It is the leader’s job to ensure that they are well trained and feel confident to perform their duties. To give them responsibility and hold them accountable to advance the mission. If the captain provides direction and protection, the crew will do what needs to be done to advance the mission.  That’s what the best leaders do. They share what they know, ask knowledgeable people for help performing their duties and make introductions to create new relationships within their networks. Poor leaders hoard these things, falsely believing it is their intelligence, rank or relationships that make them valuable. It is not.

“The goal of a leader is to give no orders,” Captain Marquet explains. “Leaders are to provide direction and intent and allow others to figure out what to do and how to get there.” And this is the challenge most organizations face. “We train people to comply, not to think,” Captain Marquet goes on. If people only comply, we can’t expect people to take responsibility for their actions. The chain of command is for orders, not information. Responsibility is not doing as we are told, that’s obedience. Responsibility is doing what is right.

All leaders, in order to truly lead, need to walk the halls and spend time with the people they serve, “eyeball leadership,” as the Marines call it.

In a PowerPoint presentation shown to newly elected Democratic members of Congress, the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) recommends a “model schedule” while members are in Washington: four hours spent making fund-raising calls, one to two hours for constituent visits, two hours for work on the floor or in committee, one hour for strategic outreach (breakfasts, meet and greets, and press) and one hour of recharge time. In fact, Tom Perriello, who served in Congress for one term, told the Huffington Post that the “four hours allocated to fundraising may even be ‘low balling the figure so as not to scare the new Members too much.’” Regardless of whether or not the members uphold the model schedule, it is just another example of the pressure to make the numbers, win elections and stay in power instead of building relationships, finding common ground and making progress for the common welfare.

The disregard for the human element of governing shows a steady downward trend in the ability of Congress to get anything done. And the effects of this are dramatic.

When a leader has the humility to distribute power across the organization, the strength of the company becomes less dependent on one person and is thus better able to survive.  If the leaders of organizations give their people something to believe in, if they offer their people a challenge that outsizes their resources but not their intellect, the people will give everything they’ve got to solve the problem. And in the process, not only will they invent and advance the company, they may even change an industry or the world in the process (just as an early version of Microsoft did).

Human beings have thrived for fifty thousand years not because we are driven to serve ourselves, but because we are inspired to serve others. All we need are leaders to give us a good reason to commit ourselves to each other.

Everything about being a leader is like being a parent. It is about committing to the well-being of those in our care and having a willingness to make sacrifices to see their interests advanced so that they may carry our banner long after we are gone.

Let us all be the leaders we wish we had.