Overview
Successful people and businesses are driven by a sense of purpose. For the individual on a career path, “starting with why” is an ongoing process of seeking that sense of purpose and being honest about where it exist for you. For businesses, it means creating a purpose-driven environment that nurtures each employee’s individual quest. In this masterclass, ethnographer and leadership expert Simon Sinek explains how to find direction and fulfillment in your personal and professional life and for your organization.
What You'll Learn
How to design organizational cultures
How to be happy at work
How to build your north-star vision
How to be competitive all the time
Episodes
1. Build a Culture by Design
Just like people, too many companies don’t know themselves. A company’s culture is its character, and every company has one. It’s the sum total of the unspoken rules about how teams work (or don’t work) together. About how management treats team members and how they treat one another. But those that consciously build the culture they want will become much better companies than those that just let it happen on its own. So how do you build culture? It’s a matter of committing to a set of acti...
2. Responsible for results
Too many companies are doing a transparent juggling act—pretending for the sake of hiring and retention to care first about their employees, while their hearts really belong to the bottom line. Of course customer service matters. Of course sales matter. But these results are better served when you prioritize the well-being and professional growth of the front-line employees who build those relationships. The difference between lip-service and cultural commitment are obvious to everyone. Employe...
3. Build Trusting Teams
Fundamentally, what makes a company strong is a culture of trust. When workers feel trusted by and trust in their colleagues, managers, and leaders, they’re able to admit vulnerability and to learn on the job. This is the nature of a healthy organization—that everyone from the CEO on down feels secure enough to ask for help and to improve together for the benefit of the company.
4. Be Happy at Work
How can you tell if you’re happy at work is the same way as telling if you’re happy in any human relationship. We have relationships with our organizations, with our jobs, as we have relationships with any tribe. If you’re a member of a club where you have unbelievable love and loyalty for the people in that club, that church, then you go do it more and you give lots of energy and time to it. Well, it’s the same thing. Do you wake up excited to get dressed and go to work? Do you dread Monday...
5. Fulfill a Vision
A vision is what gets you out of bed in the morning. It’s what validates an organization’s existence over the long haul. But not everybody is a visionary, spontaneously possessed with Joan-of-Arc-like certainty in their life’s mission. As Simon Sinek points out, there’s a lot of cultural pressure, especially within entrepreneurial spheres, to be Joan of Arc even if you’re not. But for those who aren’t sure where their personal North Star lies, he proposes a different approach—instead of s...
6. Be Your Own Competition
Truly successful people and companies share one thing: the liberating knowledge that at any given moment, someone somewhere is better than you. Of course your competitor’s moves should matter to you, but they shouldn’t drive your strategy. Your best chance of long-term success is to be in constant competition with yourself.
Supplemental Materials