A few years ago Marie Forleo interviewed Simon Sinek on her podcast and they discussed “The Environment Good Leaders Create“. It was a short (12 min) fascinating discussion, and you can listen to it here.
Here are a few things that I pulled from it:
“Most leaders think leadership is about being in charge. No, it’s not. It’s about taking care of those in your charge. Most leaders think everybody works for them. No, you work for the people in your organization. It is your responsibility to take care of them, make them feel safe, and they will naturally want to cooperate and work hard and give you their blood and sweat and tears to advance your vision.”
Related, he also added:
“Leadership is the practice of putting the lives of others sometimes ahead of our interests.”
The last piece from the podcast that I’ll share reminded me a lot of the concept of Sonder; the moment when you realize that everyone around you has an internal life as rich and as conflicted as yours.
“So practicing leadership is like driving to work in the morning and someone wants to cut in your lane. Do you go forward or do you pull back? That’s leadership. Like, we don’t know. Maybe they’re running late for a big interview and they’ve been unemployed for six months. Maybe their boss is an ogre and they left late because their kids had trouble getting out to school today.”
Taking time to understand what might really be going on behind the scenes of someone else can make a huge difference in your outlook on the world. Using the car example in that last quote, I intentionally let people get away with all kinds of stuff when I’m driving, as it keeps me safer and keeps my stress levels down. All told, it makes my trips in the car last like 10 seconds longer because someone cut in front of me. I really don’t understand why people let things build up to the point of “road rage”.
Take care of those around you, understand that everyone has a full and complicated life, and things will go better on every front.
