Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t is the natural extension of Start with Why, expanding his ideas at the organizational level. Determining a company’s WHY is crucial, but it is only the beginning. The next step is how do you get people on board with your WHY? Through powerful and inspiring stories, Sinek describes how to support an organization’s WHY while continually adding people to the mix.
The book was inspired by a conversation Sinek had with a Marine Corps general who told him that ‘officers eat last’. When they go to eat, junior marines eat first while the most senior officers take their place at the back of the line in the chow hall. In other words, great leaders sacrifice their own comfort for the good of those in their care.
My Favorite Top 25 Quotes From Leaders Eat Last
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” ― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.” ― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
“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.” ― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
“As the Zen Buddhist saying goes, how you do anything is how you do everything.” ― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
“Returning from work feeling inspired, safe, fulfilled and grateful is a natural human right to which we are all entitled and not a modern luxury that only a few lucky ones are able to find.” ― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
“And when a leader embraces their responsibility to care for people instead of caring for numbers, then people will follow, solve problems and see to it that that leader’s vision comes to life the right way, a stable way and not the expedient way.” ― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
“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.” ― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
“Let us all be the leaders we wish we had.” ― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
“Stress and anxiety at work have less to do with the work we do and more to do with weak management and leadership.” ― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
“The rank of office is not what makes someone a leader. Leadership is the choice to serve others with or without any formal rank.” ― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
“Integrity is when our words and deeds are consistent with our intentions.” ― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
“All the perks, all the benefits and advantages you may get for the rank or position you hold, they aren’t meant for you. They are meant for the role you fill. And when you leave your role, which eventually you will, they will give the ceramic cup to the person who replaces you. Because you only ever deserved a Styrofoam cup.” ― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
“Leaps of greatness require the combined problem-solving ability of people who trust each other.” ― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
“The ability of a group of people to do remarkable things hinges on how well those people pull together as a team.”
“Good leadership is like exercise. We do not see any improvement to our bodies with day-to-day comparisons. In fact, if we only compare the way our bodies look on a given day to how they looked the previous day, we would think our efforts had been wasted. It’s only when we compare pictures of ourselves over a period of weeks or months that we can see a stark difference. The impact of leadership is best judged over time”
“Leadership takes work. It takes time and energy. The effects are not always easily measured and they are not always immediate. Leadership is always a commitment to human beings.”
“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.”
“And that’s what trust is. We don’t just trust people to obey the rules, we also trust that they know when to break them.”
“Leadership is not a license to do less; it is a responsibility to do more.”
“Truly human leadership protects an organization from the internal rivalries that can shatter a culture. When we have to protect ourselves from each other, the whole organization suffers. But when trust and cooperation thrive internally, we pull together and the organization grows stronger as a result.”
“I know of no case study in history that describes an organization that has been managed out of a crisis. Every single one of them was led.”
“The cost of leadership,” explains Lieutenant General George Flynn of the United States Marine Corps, “is self-interest.”
“What this means is that the converse is also true. 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. Those only doing as they are told, always forced to follow the rules, are the ones who suffer the most. Our feelings of control, stress, and our ability to perform at our best are all directly tied to how safe we feel in our organizations. Feeling unsafe around those we expect to feel safe—those in our tribes (work is the modern version of the tribe)—fundamentally violates the laws of nature and how we were designed to live.”
“A 2011 study conducted by a team of social scientists at the University of Canberra in Australia concluded that having a job we hate is as bad for our health and sometimes worse than not having a job at all.”
“Children are better off having a parent who works into the night in a job they love than a parent who works shorter hours but comes home unhappy. This is the influence our jobs have on our families. Working late does not negatively affect our children, but rather, how we feel at work does. Our jobs don’t just affect us. They affect our families.”
Buy on Amazon: Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
