Leadership development must start here | Simon Sinek

there's not a single person in any organization that has any moral problem with somebody more senior than them getting a higher salary they may be ineffective at their job but it doesn't bother us that somebody who outranks us makes a higher salary or gets a bigger office or has a better parking space it's totally fine in other words we're used to deferring to and giving special treatment to those who are higher in the pecking order however none of those perks come for free you see the group is not stupid we don't give all those advantages

to our leaders for nothing there's an expectation there's an expectation that if danger threatens the tribe that the leader the one who's better fed and more confident who's stronger will rush towards the danger to protect us that's why we gave them first choice of mate because they might die first and we want to keep their genes in the gene pool we're not stupid and so what makes us loyal and love and respect our leaders is when we know that they uphold that deal when we have visceral contempt for some of our leaders like we have

visceral contempt for some of the banking ceos and their disproportionate salaries and bonus structures it's because we know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed so they could keep their bonuses and salaries or worse they chose to sacrifice their people to protect their bonuses and salaries and this is why we do not trust them we are not loyal to them and why we sometimes have visceral contempt for them the leaders we admire the leaders we follow are the ones that we know would sacrifice their interest to take care of us that's the deal that's

the anthropological definition of leadership it is always balanced the perks of leadership are not free they come at the cost of self-interest they come at the cost of taking care of those in our charge to learn even more from the world's biggest thinkers get big think plus for your business