The key ideas

Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't

Simon Sinek, 2014

In some teams people risk themselves for one another. In others they hide their mistakes and wait for a knife in the back. Simon Sinek looked for the reason among Marines, military pilots and factory owners. The answer was not pay or talent. It was whether people feel safe among their own. The book shows how a leader creates that feeling and how a leader destroys it.

Who it is for

For anyone who leads people or is about to. And for anyone who has ever worked in a place where everyone covers themselves, and wants to understand why it turns out that way.

Leadership is not a license to do less; it is a responsibility to do more.

What the book is about

Night in the mountains of Afghanistan, less than a year after 9/11. Twenty-two American soldiers are moving through a deep valley when they come under fire. Above the clouds, Captain Mike Drowley circles in his A-10. Dropping down in the dark, between the rocks, almost blind, is extremely dangerous. He drops down anyway. When the author later asked him why, the answer was simpler than any rulebook: because they would have done the same for him.

Simon Sinek, the author of Start with Why, set out to answer a question. Why are people in some teams willing to risk themselves for each other, while in others they spend their energy covering themselves? He looked for the answer among Marines, pilots and company leaders. Ahead of you are his central idea about feeling safe, a simple model of how trust and stress work inside us, and the story of a factory owner who found a way to lay off no one in the 2009 crisis.

Idea 1. People are brave outside when they are not afraid inside

The author has a name for the central image of the book: the Circle of Safety. It is a boundary around a team. Outside there are always dangers: competitors, crises, failures. Inside, no one has to protect themselves from their own people.

Why does this matter so much? A person has only so much energy. If they fear the boss, the gossip or being fired for any slip, the energy goes into defending themselves against their own, not into the work. People hide their mistakes and bring bad news late. When the circle is strong, people raise problems early and help each other, like those soldiers and the pilot above the valley.

Many leaders make the mistake of thinking fear is a good motivator. In the short run it can push people. In the long run they start working for their own safety, not for the common cause.

How to use it: in your own team, notice what people keep quiet about when the boss is in the room. That is where the circle has cracked.

At a morning meeting, a new hire notices that a report went to a client with a wrong figure. In one team, he says so at once, and the mistake is fixed within the hour. In another, he stays silent, because last time the person at fault was mocked in front of everyone. A week later the client finds the mistake on their own.

A team is protected from outside threats exactly as much as its people are not afraid of each other.

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About the author

Simon Sinek is a British American writer and speaker, the author of Start with Why. He advises companies and the military on leadership and trust within teams.

All books by this author: Simon Sinek

Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't Quiz

Terms from the book

  • Endorphins
  • Dopamine
  • Cortisol
  • Flynn
  • Serotonin
  • Oxytocin
  • Milgram
  • Chapman
  • A-10: An armored American attack aircraft built to support troops on the ground. It flies relatively low and slow so it can cover soldiers below.
  • Drowley: Mike Drowley, call sign Johnny Bravo, a captain in the US Air Force. Sinek opens the book with his night mission over Afghanistan.
  • Circle of Safety: An image from the book, not a scientific term. It is the author's name for the space inside a team where people do not need to protect themselves from each other or from the boss.
  • Marine Corps: The United States Marine Corps, a separate branch of the armed forces. Sinek spent a lot of time observing it while gathering material for the book.
  • Whitehall Study: A long running British study of the health of civil servants. It showed that staff in the lowest grades were, on average, in worse health than their bosses.
  • abstraction: In the book: the state in which a person sees numbers, reports and rows in a spreadsheet instead of living people.
  • Dunbar's number: About 150 people. According to the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, this is the most people with whom one person can keep up real relationships.
  • W. L. Gore: The American company that makes Gore-Tex fabric. Its founder limited the number of people in one building to about 150.
  • Barry-Wehmiller: An American group of companies that makes packaging and industrial machinery.
  • furlough: Time when an employee does not work and is not paid, but keeps their job.

All terms

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