Conscious Leadership Book Club: 5 — Start With Why
“Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them.”
― Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
1 Paragraph Summary:
The book of leadership and inspiration. Start with Why shows that leaders who have made the most impact in the world have all acted and communicated in the same way — ‘The Golden Circle’ of people.
Within this book, Sinek provides a framework upon organisations can be built and people can be inspired. It all starts with WHY.
Things this book will teach you
- The ability to inspire those around you and to achieve remarkable results starts with WHY. Your WHY is your purpose, cause or belief.
- Any organisation can explain what it does; some of those can explain how they do it; but only a few can explain WHY. People don’t buy WHAT you do, they but WHY you do it.
- Those who start with WHY never manipulate, they inspire. When your WHY goes fuzzy, it becomes much more difficult to maintain the growth, loyalty and inspiration that helped drive your original success.
“The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen.”
― Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
Lesson 1: World that doesn’t start with why
If you want to inspire others, always communicate your why. Every company in the world knows what they do — which is why they use this as the first thing to tell people about. Why we put this at the forefront of everything we do and say. BUT rationale is a weak way of trying to get us to make decisions, that’s because we are emotional and emotive people — and these emotions trump reason every time. Only when we know why we do or say things to we then feel a powerful sense of purpose and belonging. Only then do we feel called to act.
Lesson 2: An alternative perspective
Therefore great leaders and companies use why and this powerful sense of purpose to get us to decide. These leaders and companies start all communication with why they do things, eventually followed by how they do things. And they reveal what it is they actually do last.
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Emotions trump reasons
Lesson 3: The biggest challenge of success
“two ways to influence human behaviour: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.” ― Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
When you are competing with everyone else, competing with the world — No one wants to help you. When you are competing with yourself everyone wants to help you.
In business we are always competing against someone else. Improvements in offer, services, quality, quantity, speed — There are always improvements to make. We are constantly comparing ourselves to the competition and focusing our time and attention on this.
But what if we started to compete against ourselves, showed up every day to be better versions of us. To remember our why — and to leave every day in a better position in a better outlook than when we started.
The biggest challenge of success is not your competition it's you.
Review
This book helps to teach us what it means to dare greatly, rise strong and brave the wilderness. Using the new research conducted with leaders, change-makers and culture shifters she is showing us how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up and lead.
When we dare to lead, we don’t pretend to have the right answers, we stay curious and ask the right questions.
