SIMON SINEK - why you only win with consistency | EYE OPENING SPEECH

do you love your wife yes right prove it like what's the metric give me the number that helps me know right cuz when you met her you didn't love her right now you love her right tell me the day the love happened it's an impossible question right but it's not that it doesn't exist it's that it's much easier to prove over time right so all leadership is the same thing it's about transitions so if you were to if you were to go to the gym right sit like exercise right if you go to the gym

and you work out and you come back and you look in the mirror you will see nothing and if you go to the gym the next day and you come back and you look in the mirror you will see nothing right so clearly there's no results can't be measured it must not be effective so we quit right or if you fundamentally believe that this is the right course of action and you stick with it like in a relationship I bought her flowers and I wished her happy birthday and she doesn't let me clearly I'll give

up you know that's not what happens if you if you believe there's something there you commit yourself to act an act of service you can meet yourself to the regime the exercise you can screw it up you can eat chocolate cake one day you can skip a skip a day or two you know you it allows for that but if you stick with it consistently I'm not exactly sure what day but I know you'll start getting into shape I know it and the same with the relationship it's not about the events it's not about intensity

it's about consistency right you go to the dentist twice a year your teeth will fall out you have to brush your teeth every day for two minutes what is brushing your day twice a day for two minutes do nothing unless you do it every day twice a day for two minutes right it's the consistency going to the gym for nine hours does not get you into shape working out everyday for 20 minutes gets you into shape so the problem is we treat leadership with intensity we have a two-day off-site we would invite a bunch of

speakers we give everybody certificate you're a leader right those things are like going to the dentist they're very important that good for reminding us or getting us back on track learning new lessons but it's the daily practice of all the monotonous little boring things like brushing your teeth that matter the most she didn't fall in love with you because you remembered her birthday and bought her flowers in Valentine's Day she fell in love with you because when you woke up in the morning you said good morning to her before you checked your phone she fell

in love with you because when you went to the fridge to get yourself a drink you got her one without even asking she fell in love with you because when you had an amazing day at work and she came home and she had a terrible day at work you didn't say yeah yeah yeah but let me tell you about my day you sat and listened to her awful day and you didn't say a thing about your amazing day this is why she fell in love with you I can't tell you exactly what day and it

was no specular thing you did it was the accumulation of all of those little things that she woke up one days and is as if she pressed a button she goes I love him right leadership is exactly the same there's no event there's no thing I can tell you you have to do that your people will trust you it just doesn't work that way it's then it's an accumulation of lots and lots of little things that anyone by themselves is innocuous and useless literally pointless by themselves people will look at little things that are good

leadership practice and say that won't work and you're absolutely right but if you do it consistently and you do it in combination with lots of other little things like saying good morning to someone that looking in the eye my friend George was a three-star general in the Marine Corps he says his test for leadership and I love this he goes his test really a good leaders if you ask somebody how their day is going you actually care about the answer right the number of times were walking to a meeting we're rushing we go how are

you not good I gotta get to you later I got him late for a meeting if you ask the question you were standing there and you're listening to the answer it's those little innocuous things that you do over and over and over and over that people will say I love my job not I like my job I like my job means yeah the challenge is great they pay me well I like the people I love my job means I don't want to work anywhere else I don't care how much somebody else was willing to pay

me I'm devoted to the people here and I care desperately about the people here as if they were my family in business we have colleagues and co-workers in the military they have brothers and sisters that's how they think of each other right if you really have a strong corporate culture the people will think of each other like brothers and sisters don't really it's like a family right no brothers and sisters deep love fight but the love doesn't go away right bicker the love doesn't go away and I'll fight with my sister but if you threaten

my sister you're gonna have to deal with me right right we'll fight internally we'll bicker with each other but nobody's gonna hurt each other and if anything from the outside shows up you got it you're looking at a unified front brothers and sisters now how do you create brothers and sisters out of strangers common beliefs common values you know parents in other words executives who care about their children's success who care to raise their children teach them skills discipline them when necessary help them build their self-confidence so that they couldn't go on and achieve something

more than you could have ever imagined achieving for yourself that's leadership an absolute love and devotion for the people who've committed their lives to this enterprise that's such a brilliant reframe it's so simple and so beautiful and and unbelievably hard work it is and it isn't here's here's why it is you said it it's hard to measure right it's hard for me to show art to measure in the short term it's very easy to measure in the long term over the long term the traditional metrics will go up all your revenues profits market share the

traditional metrics will go up and more importantly they'll go up more stable II right you will be able to weather hard times better because the people will come together they won't abandon ship right in the over the long term the traditional metrics are just fine but also over the long term your churn will go down right you won't be going through employees as much right over the long term you'll find that loyalty is much higher that people will turn down better paying jobs right over the long term all the additional metrics are just fine and

then some it's only the short-term that it's hard to measure yeah I'm gonna say though there's something in between those two in the middle - no because with working out so to use your analogy if you had to go to the gym for six months before you saw any sign of change no one would do it right and there are so many variables and working out the number one thing is to know who to listen to the number one thing is to know what to look for right so if you don't experience muscle fatigue you're

probably doing something different that's a media right I know that the next day if you experience muscle fatigue and don't notice any change within a few weeks you're probably not eating right so there really are things that you can look at because you're doing the damage to the muscle but you're not giving your body the nutrients that you need to actually build well that's all that's all that still true so I'm sitting here thinking kind of really be as simple as like I have a growing belief that part of what you could write down as

a leaders job is to connect now how do we connect you've given some very simple examples and they're all incredibly real asking somebody how their day is and actually waiting to hear the answer and caring about what the answer is time spent together right I couldn't have a very effective relationship with my wife there actually isn't time together and one of the things that that I have personally struggled with is as the organization has grown just time with any individual becomes more and more difficult and so then you start focusing on okay wait it's just

about creating the environment but as you lose touch with the real sense of like I know this person and I can see when they're having a bad day and really leveraging like what we have as humans and this is why your teachings are so powerful is you you wrap it in the truth of the human experience you wrap it in how humans really connect like looking at each other sensing that like hey this is either hitting or it's not like all of that stuff is super super real and as an organization to be able to

find ways in that middle ground where it's like I'm pretty sure this is working and I really believe in it at a macro level but I just want to know because there's so many paths right and you could nudge sort of one way or the other to create something that and maybe it's as simple as here's what I'm using this right now the amount of laughter right here in the office maybe that's dumb I don't know but I'm really doing it and I really think all day like how much laughter have I heard today and

I feel like when everyone is making and really taking an effort to connect with each other to provide empathy and all that there's a lowering of people's defenses and just a sort of natural outpouring of that is is joking around and so you hear this laughter bubble and when things get really tense and stressful I literally feel like you could have a decibel meter and just feel it coming down I mean look it's it's a human it's a human thing so just as you know how your body feels after a good workout you know how

your body feels after a big greasy meal you know you you know that one is good for you and one is not you know despite what it may taste like and that's the problem with short-term gains right they feel really good in the short term so it's it's we're highly highly highly trained social animals were highly adapted social animals you know we we can feel social awkwardness and we can feel when things are going well you know we you can sense it you say you have this sense of laughter you know around the office like

we're not we're not we don't walk around with blinders when you know we're like I said we're made to do this you know that's why we can assess if somebody's trustworthy or not you know puts why we keep our walls and oh my god yeah yeah his results are great but I wouldn't trust him right you know as opposed to letting on you but like I trust her for it anything I trust with my kids my money anything you know so so we're highly attuned animals and so we're good at sensing it but I will

say there is a caveat to to your to your metric of laughter which is a decent one is that scale breaks things right in human beings as I said before we're not made for populations bigger than about 150 ish it's called Dunbar's number Robin Dunbar professor from Cambridge University theorized that we cannot maintain more than a hundred and about about 150 close relationships and the way he defined a close relationship is if you're at a bar with a bunch of friends and somebody comes in would you ask that person to join you or not and

we it's about a hundred and fifty that we would ask them to come join us and if you think about the reason that actually makes perfect sense which is there's two limiting factors one is time if you only gave two minutes to every person you know you'd make no close friends and the other one is memory you just can't remember everybody and so this is where leadership leadership becomes very interesting because if you have a company that has a lot of people five six seven eight hundred and people a thousand two thousand five thousand people

clearly you can't know everyone and clearly as a CEO look I care about every single of my people you don't even know some of the people you work for a real but we work for you ambassadors you don't care about that right so the nones it's a nonsense statement right right but what you can say is I desperately care about the people whose names I know and whose faces I recognize and I care desperately about my leadership and I instill in them every day that I will give them the tools and I will take care

of them with one purpose of one purpose only that they will take care of the people in their charge and I want those people to take care of the people and instill in them that they take care of the people in their charge and then by the time you get down to the masses where the actual thousand exists because of the seniors it's like 20 sure right where the real thousand exist they feel about a hundred and a hundred and fifty of them can look to one of their direct leaders to one of their direct

managers and say that person cares about me mm-hmm that's our boss that's my boss that's my leader not the leader it's the CEO that's my manager my boss my leader sometimes sometimes you get fired sometimes you get in trouble sometimes you'll lose your job and the next guy will get all the credit it's all true and the courage to do the right thing in the face of overwhelming pressure only the best leaders have that courage only the best leaders and here's the folly courage is not some deep internal fortitude you don't dig down deep and

find the courage right it just doesn't exist courage is external our courage comes from the support we feel from others in other words when someone when you feel that someone has your back when you see you you know that the day that you admit you can't do it someone will be there and say I got you you can do this that's what gives you the courage to do the difficult thing it's not going off to an ashram by yourself somewhere for four weeks and coming back and finding the car it's not what happens it's the

relationships that we foster it's the people around us who love us and care about us and believe in us and when have those relationships we will find the courage to do the right thing and when you act with courage that in turn will inspire those in your organization to also act with courage in other words it's still an external thing that's what inspiration is right I'm inspired to follow your example but those relationships that we foster over the course of a lifetime will not only make us into the leaders we need to be in and

hope we can be but they'll often save your life they'll save you from depression they'll save you from giving up they'll save you from any matter of you know negative feelings about your own capabilities your own future when someone just says I love you and I will follow you no matter what