Simon Sinek on the power of putting culture first

Damon Klotz:

If I asked you to name a thought leader in the company culture space, my assumption would be that Simon Sinek is one of the first names that would come to mind.

His books top the best seller lists year after year, and his ability to tell stories that inspire behaviour change have had a tremendous impact on how I approach my work.

I’d even argue that right now in a meeting room at a company that you and I never heard of, there is someone explaining the golden circle and the importance of starting with why. I say that knowing that I’ve sat in those rooms, and I’ve also been the instigator who’s asked everyone to remember to reflect on the why and how, instead of of the what.

A couple of years back, I was able to sit down with Simon at Culture Amp’s Culture First Conference, it was a conversation that I feel like was a decade in the making.

I’m really glad to be releasing the extended version of this chat for the first time today and I’m feeling super optimistic that you’re going to love it.

Whether you’ve read every single one of his best-selling books, or you’ve never heard of him before, this is a frank conversation with the person who refuses to be titled anything other than Simon Sinek, Optimist. He’ll explain why in just a minute.

During our conversation, optimism does take centre stage along with the power of listening and the undeniable impact of humility. We also discuss the need for leaders to have what Simon has termed an Infinite Mindset and how they can do this through a willful focus on a higher purpose or cause.

We talk about how much he hates the word managers, creating safe spaces, and the delicate balance between being a know-it-all and a learn-it-all.

And you’ll hear Simon struggle to translate the way Australians, myself included, say the word ‘jerk’, so we exchange the term ‘brilliant jerk’ for ‘toxic genius’ before tackling how to best deal with them in a culture first way.

Even back when this interview was recorded in 2019, pre-ChatGPT, Simon used our chat as a platform to express his concerns about the power and influence of big tech companies and the need for balancing their role in society.

Here’s four things to listen out for that will help you create an amazing culture:

How to create a performance system that incentives the desired behaviours of your company cultures

Why the question, to what end, will reframe how you make decisions

What a world without storytelling would look like

And, what we can learn from the companies who’ve had culture first transformations that allowed them to play the long game and who Simon thinks is doing a great job of putting culture first.

Damon Klotz:

One last thing. If you head to my Instagram page you’ll see a video clip from this interview where you’ll notice that Simon is wearing something Orange. Stay around to my closing thoughts to learn the story behind the symbolism of the colour orange and why he chose it.

All right, let’s head over to my conversation with Simon Sinek.

Damon Klotz:

Thanks for joining me.

Simon Sinek:

Nice to be here.

Damon Klotz:

So we don't know each other that well right now. So what's one thing that you might want to ask of me that might open up this conversation with a bit of heart talk?

Simon Sinek:

Well, I like to know where people are from. I like to know what their backgrounds are and how they find themselves where they are right now. So I think asking people about their families or where they come from, it's a free space to talk about yourself. I think a lot of people are uncomfortable talking about themselves, but that's a little more objective.

Damon Klotz:

I think our place of home and where we come from tells a lot about us and sort of where we end up actually. So you and I are both far from our original homes. So where were you born?

Simon Sinek:

Originally from England, right? Yeah, a long time ago.

Damon Klotz:

And you've now called the United States Home for

Simon Sinek:

Many, many years.

Damon Klotz:

And I'm from Australia and I now call it the United States home. Does that change your perspective when you find yourself with a lived experience that's now very different to where you find yourself now?

Simon Sinek:

Well, I grew up all over the world as a kid. I was born in England, moved to South Africa, back to England, then to Hong Kong, and then to New Jersey from Hong Kong to New Jersey. So it was radical shift and I went back to England after college as well. So I mean it's definitely had an effect on my life. Of course, my sister and I are both very different people, very different personalities, but we're both very comfortable being dropped off into strange places and figuring it out. That's as true for work as well, which is the unusual, the new or the uncomfortable. We tend to sort of navigate it and it's not because of some innate gifts, it's because we were very lucky that growing up we lived all over the world.

Damon Klotz:

You call yourself an optimist first, and I think someone with your kind of stature and you're quite well known, people might label you with other things, but why is it important for you to always say, I'm an optimist first.

Simon Sinek:

I don't want to ever be labelled or label myself by what I do because what if I don't do that anymore then I don't want my identity tied to my work. My work is the thing that I do to advance something bigger than myself, but what have I changed that or stop doing it? So I always insist that if anybody wants to refer to me as anything, refer to me first by who I think I am and how I identify myself, which is an optimist and then you can tell people what they've done.

Damon Klotz:

Yeah, I think you've got this incredible ability as a storyteller that people really get, not necessarily bought in, but I think you just tell a story in a way that makes people really feel something. But you also worked in marketing and advertising. Do you think that played a really big role in the way that you've been able to effectively tell these stories to many people around the world?

Simon Sinek:

No, I don't think so. I think that that's always been how I've been. I mean, I think in metaphors, I think visually, and so the way I like to understand things, the way I can more easily grasp a subject is if somebody tells me a story. And so the way I learned to interpret ideas is through metaphors and stories, and that's how I explain things because that's how I view them. And I think to truly grasp an idea, the ability to create a metaphor about it or tell a story that captures, I think is a good sign that you grasp the concept.

Damon Klotz:

Yeah, I think where I am in my career right now versus where I started, I've actually probably lived four or five different lives. But the thing that stayed the same is the ability to actually help people with behavioural change and to be inspired by something new that they didn't know that they might've even needed or were capable of. So that's actually been my through line. So started off as a HR practitioner, then did more consulting and speaking around HR technology. Then actually just left it all behind and said, I'm going to try something else. I did a digital marketing in a healthcare company and then I actually co-founded a men's mental health charity where I try to use language and behaviour change to actually have a different conversation around men's mental health and to help men reduce the suicide rate in Australia. And then I ended up joining a startup and then doing more marketing work and now this as a storyteller. But throughout my whole career, I think what I found is it's actually just storytelling that helps people see the world in a different way that they leave than inspired to actually sort of want to be part of that change.

Simon Sinek:

I mean, that is the goal. All of my work can be explained without stories and it'll just be boring. There's research in there and there's empirical data in there and there's explanation in there, but it's the stories people remember and a lot of them are real people. And so you can reference them, you can talk to them, you can visit them, you can meet them, you can get a feeling for who they are, just like you did in the story, just like you heard in the story. I think that's sort of a magical thing. It starts to make things real.

Damon Klotz:

Yeah. When I think about my twenties and trying to work at different companies, rise up quite quickly. And then I was probably a little bit, not impatient, but just I wanted to be something quick. And then your new book is actually about thinking a lot longer. I recently turned 30.

Simon Sinek:

Congratulations.

Damon Klotz:

It's a milestone. It's a milestone. And I don't know, my thinking shifted. I think for the first time in my career I'm actually planning at least 10 years out and I think that I'm, this week I feel like I'm maybe at 1% of this next journey. So how do you help people actually see the world or even see their own lives with a much longer kind of look as opposed to what you need right now?

Simon Sinek:

It's really about context, which is it's okay to have the short view, but to what end? And having an Infinite Mindset is really understanding that there's a context for all of the wins contained within our lives. I want to get promoted. To what end? So I can advance in the world. To what end? So I can make more money. To what end? So I can buy more stuff. To what end? And ultimately, I hope at the end of that string of questions, there's actually some higher sense of purpose or cause, which is I do these things to advance something bigger than myself. The reason for me to operate with scale, the reason I want to advance this company, I want to build a company is because what we're doing is using our company to advance something bigger than ourselves. And so that's why we want to grow. It's not growth for growth's sake. And I think very often without that infinite mindset, without that infinite context, it does become growth for growth's sake or money for money's sake, which at some point becomes unbelievably unfulfilling and at some point becomes an unbearable pressure with no particular meaning associated to it. So the infinite mindset is really a context for all the stuff that we do in our lives that is more finite.

Damon Klotz:

How does that actually play out inside of an organisation? I know you speak a lot about the role that leaders play in actually making this change. So let's say that you've got a team of 10 and you actually want them to think bigger and thinking bigger actually might mean beyond even this company, this team or the world that they know. How do you actually help people start to think and see the world in that way?

Simon Sinek:

Well, the company should have a sense of purpose or cause there should be a vision that is an idealised state of the world that is practically for all practical purposes unachievable. But we will devote our company and what we do to help advance that cause. Sometimes in the product, but just sometimes in how we operate, there's plenty of companies that make widgets that have nothing to do with the cause, but the manner in which they treat their people, the manner in which they conduct their business is the thing that they're using to advance their higher sense of purpose or, cause I've talked about this company before, Barry Waymiller, it's a manufacturing company with the headquarters in the Midwest and they make big machines. That's what they make. But if you ask the CEO, Bob Chapman, what does the company do? He said, we build people to do extraordinary things.

And you say, well, how do you measure that? He says, well, we measure our success by how we touch the lives of people and then he means it. And you can hear it in the language of the company. They don't have a head count, they have a heart count. It's very hard to reduce a heart count at the end of the year. People reduce head counts all the time and so can feel it in the way that they do business. They're trying to, and Bob in particular is trying to get more companies to see business this way now it has nothing to do with manufacturing, it has to do with how they built their culture and that is entirely done by leaders.

Damon Klotz:

Is that an example of a Culture First company to you? Or does something else come to mind when I say what is a culture first company and what are some of the behaviours you might see inside of one?

Simon Sinek:

Well, that's a great example of a Culture First company. I think Culture First, companies understand that people come to for-profit. We are living in a world that are understanding of how business works, largely comes from the eighties and nineties where it's about maximising shareholder value, where growth for growth's sake. And that actually is a relatively new concept. The idea of using mass layoffs on an annualised basis to balance the book. These are relatively new concepts. They haven't always existed that way. It's really the eighties and nineties that establish those as standard. And at the end of the day, we can see the damage that has been caused. From after the Great Depression until the mid 1980s, we had zero stock market crashes. Since the dismantling of Glass-Steagall in the name of corporate profit, we've had three, we had 2008, we had the dotcom boom and we had Black Monday before that.

So you can see that we're actually creating imbalance in our system. And so what I'm trying to do, what you're trying to do when we talk about putting people before profit, that's it's actually a better form of capitalism than we have now. People accuse me of being anti-capitalist. No, I love Adam Smith capitalism. I don't like Milton Friedman capitalism. There's a big difference. Milton Friedman was an economist in the 1970s who theorised that the purpose of business is to maximise profit within the bounds of the law. What about ethics? Right? Of course, companies exist for more than just profit. There's only one thing on the planet that grows for growth's sake and that's cancer, right? Companies have to exist for something else and that's why we want to work there. But Adam Smith, the capitalism, he talked about Thomas Jefferson owned all three volumes of the wealth of nations, the capitalism that Adam Smith envisioned, that's the capitalism that made America what it is today.

And it is about people first. And I'm not talking about 90 10, it's not about the absence of money. Clearly you have to have money in order to stay alive. It's about will and resources, but there's a bias. There's a bias towards will because there will be decisions big and small sometimes on a daily basis. Where do we choose the people or do we choose the money? And it's not always possible to save both. So the companies that have the bias towards people, what you find is those companies have greater trust, greater cooperation, they're way more innovative. And in hard times their people rally together. The companies that have a bias for money before people trust is sometimes suffers. Cooperation suffers, innovation suffers. And in hard times everybody's like, I'm out of here. There's no loyalty. What I love about culture first is it's another way of saying put people first and you'll be amazed at what happens. Organisations that put people first outperform the organisations that put money first over the course of time. Jack Welch, who is the CEO of GE in the heady days of the eighties and nineties and was seen as the poster child for how business should work. Well, GE needed a $300 billion bailout in 2008, and now we're not even sure that it's going to survive. So that didn't work out so well. It wasn't built to last. That's the problem.

Damon Klotz:

What are some companies that you think have already made that leap to that infinite mindset?

Simon Sinek:

Well, some companies are there and some companies come in and out of it. Walmart used to be an infinite minded company, then it wasn't under Mike Duke. And now it is again under Doug McMillan. Microsoft used to be infinite minded then it wasn't under Steve Ballmer. Now it is again under Satya Nadella. But a lot of the companies that we really admire, it's the container stores. Airbnb has publicly said they want to be an infinite minded company and they're building an infinite minded company. Patagonia, which we love. Sweet Green's, another one. They seem to have a cause bigger than themselves.

Damon Klotz:

I think a lot of people, the brands that they buy from are having a much bigger impact on their life. It actually says a lot about a person if you work there or if you use their products. And I think one of the core concepts that you become so famous for is people buy why. And I think for me it's also, it ties back to a meaning inside the company. So what advice do you have to someone who feels like there's a big disconnect between maybe their why and their meaning and maybe what they think the organisation stands for?

Simon Sinek:

Well, that's a multilayered question. I mean, sometimes the organisation has a clear why and I have a clear why, but they're incompatible. That one's an easy one, go somewhere else. More often than not, we're not a hundred percent sure what our why is. We haven't put it into words and neither has the company and companies talk a big game. They all have a purpose statement on their websites, but then we watch the way they make decisions. They don't seem to actually follow that purpose. And so I think we don't, although it's better if a company could say it and actually do it, just spend a little time seeing how they operate and if it feels right, if I feel like I belong, it's like making friends. It's like we're not friends with everybody in the world and there are some good people with great values that we're not friends with.

We don't have to like everybody. And how do you get to know somebody over time? We see how they act. We see how they respond under stress. We see how they respond when we're under stress, are they there? Are they helpful? Are we building rapport? Are we building trust? Do we have a common set of values? It's the exact same thing inside a company. When we have a job and we see how the leaders operate, when we're under stress, when they're under stress, we're all imperfect. Do they have a mindset of personal growth? Do they see their people as human beings do they reflect the values that we hold dear? And what we develop is a relationship with the company. And so that is a very, very good way of telling, even though I may not be able to put the why into words, I can say it doesn't feel right here. I don't feel like I belong here. And conversely, we may not be able to put it into words and say, I belong here. I really love the people here. I love coming to work. That emotional question, that emotional answer to me is one of the great signs.

Damon Klotz:

When I think back of the biggest growth opportunities that I've had in my career, it's usually because I've had to actually stop and check myself first and acknowledge that I don't know something or that maybe this is not the path for me. So I think being a know-it-all is actually very hindering in your career. And especially I remember a story that you shared once about being the first person to actually say, hang on, what does this mean? And then a lot of people were there sitting there, smiling, nodding, and actually no one knew what was going on. So being a know-it-all versus a learn it all, how would you actually try adopt that kind of idea at a company-wide level?

Simon Sinek:

What we're talking about is humility. And my favourite definition of humility was given by Bob Gaylor, who was the fifth chief master sergeant of the Air Force. And he said, don't confuse humility for meekness. Humility is being open to the ideas of others. I know some people with huge egos, but when you say, I have an idea, they lean in. So it has nothing to do with, it's not this 'aw shucks', that's not humility, that's meekness. That's as Bob Gaylor defines it, which I love. So to your point, I think one thing that we can all do is simply ask people what they think before we tell them. Before we come into meetings and we say, so here's the problem, here's what I think. What do you guys think? Too late. There's this wonderful story of Nelson Mandela and Nelson Mandela is a very important example because universally he's seen as a great leader.

Different people are seen differently depending on where you go. But Nelson Mandela universally, and he was asked by a journalist once, how did you become a great leader? And he tells the story of when he was a boy. He was actually the son of a tribal chief. And he tells the story of he would go to tribal meetings, meetings of the elders with his father. And he remembers two things. One, they always sat in a circle, and two, his father was always the last to speak. If you think about the hierarchy that we accidentally create on long tables and how senior people too often dominate conversation in meetings, even really good people, we can't help ourselves. And sometimes it's done with the desire to help, but there's something incredible about developing the skill of learning to speak last where this meeting starts and a question is posed or a problem is raised and you allow people to talk and you can ask questions, but you can't give away your opinion for or against. There's none of this then there's no nodding. It's stone face. And what you start to find is people open up and they tell you what they think and you get the benefit of all that thinking, which is amazing. And even if you stick with your original opinion, people feel heard, they feel included, which they are. So I think at a practical level for organisations of any size to practise, being the last to speak is just so fantastic.

Damon Klotz:

You might be able to help me with the situation here. I feel like I actually do that quite a lot, but it's for a different reason. I like padding, matching rather. I like pattern matching. So I like sort of seeing what's happening, connecting things that probably maybe other people don't think connect. And then trying to summarise them eloquently about what I feel like is actually happening. But I actually recently got feedback that I speak last too often and that they would actually like me to maybe put in some of those ideas earlier because it might've helped us get to a solution. So is there a balance between waiting back and being the last to speak versus knowing that you've got a good idea and sitting on it?

Simon Sinek:

Of course, of course. I mean the reason to share your patterns is giving. If it's only because you like collecting patterns, then it's really about your enjoyment. And if you're showing up with a giver's heart, you'll find that balance a little easier I think. But also there's, there's no such thing as perfect. It also depends on the personalities in the room, it depends on the dynamics, it depends on the problem or challenge that you're facing. Sometimes you might be leading the meeting and sometimes you're not leading the meeting. Sometimes it's appropriate and sometimes it's inappropriate. I think too much of anything is a bad thing. Sometimes we want hear what you say. Sometimes we'd like you to listen. The company, Chanel does a thing that I absolutely love. I can't remember if it's 30 days or 90 days, but they have a policy that new hires, new senior hires are not allowed to speak in meetings for 30 days. We know you're smart, we hired you. You don't need to prove it to us. Absorb, just shut up and listen. And I think I have a suspicion that it might be 90 days, but it might be only 30 days. But either way, it's brilliant.

Damon Klotz:

We're speaking a little bit about learn it alls versus know-it-alls. But actually to be a learn it all, you also need to create a space that's safe to actually say, I don't know something. Do you have advice for teams or have you analysed what actually creates a safer space for people to actually be the first person to say that?

Simon Sinek:

Well, leaders are the ones who create the environment. They set the space and the leader doesn't have to be the most senior person there. It's the person who takes responsibility for the environment, for the people, how people feel. We don't teach leadership very often and very well inside our companies. If you get a job, we teach you how to do your job. If you want an accountant, we're going to teach you how to do accounting so that you'll be good at it. And if you're really good at it, you'll advance and we'll eventually we'll promote you into a position where you're now responsible for the people who do the job you used to do, but we don't teach you how to do that, right? And so it's a skill. Leadership is a skill like any other. And so if we want people to be good leaders, able to create an environment in which trust can flow, we have to teach the skills like listening, active listening is a skill, a teachable, learnable, practiceable skill.

How to give and receive feedback. Effective confrontation. There's going to be confrontation. How do we do it in a way that doesn't inflame a situation or create something emotional where we can be adult about it? These are skills. So I think one of the ways we create those environments is we teach these human skills. I hate the term soft skills, and it's more than just a two day offsite and now you're all leaders. It's a regular curriculum. We also build it into the incentive packages. All we do is incentivize people or we actually can't incentivize performance. That's impossible. You can only incentivize behaviour, but we only try and reward people when they hit a number and yet we don't consider how they act at work. Well, if we built into people's compensation packages, your performance and your behaviour, you'll find people will behave better. You get the behaviour you reward. So I think these all factor in, but ultimately it's about recognising that business is a human enterprise. It's a group of people who come together every day in common purpose with common cause and all the same things that go into any kind of human dynamic, whether it's families or dating, it's all the same. It's relationships. And so all the things that make good relationships, listening, effective confrontation, go into making trusting environments and companies as well.

Damon Klotz:

Are you familiar with the Australian company? Atlassian? So they recently got quite a bit of promotion around this brand new human resource or people and culture policy that they're going to stop rewarding brilliant jerks. And they're actually building in some of those things, saying

Not rewarding?

Brilliant jerks.

Simon Sinek:

Jokes. Oh, jerks.

Damon Klotz:

Oh, jerks. So basically they're looking to actually measure behaviours and how people are acting in the same way or one third of how you measure performance.

Oh yeah. The toxic genius is unfortunately someone that we keep rewarding and a lot of leaders don't have the courage to deal with it. They very often know who they are, and we say, why don't you get rid of them? They're destroying the culture. They're creating toxicity in your company. And they would say, ah, but their performance is so good. They rationalise it, but it brings the performance of everybody else down.

Simon Sinek:

Now, I for one, do not believe that people who have performance issues or personality issues should immediately be fired. I think they should be coached. If somebody's struggling with their performance, we coach them just like you coach your kids. If they're struggling at school, we get them a tutor. And if somebody has personality issues, maybe they're a toxic genius, we coach them. The time to remove them is if they prove to be uncoachable. And if they think they don't need this or people just don't get me, then it's time to, as Garry Ridge, the CEO of WD40, which is very much a Culture First company. He says "It's time to help them go work for the competition".

Damon Klotz:

You've spent a lot of your career focused on leadership and that being a huge lever inside companies and managers touch people a lot more than the actual chief people officer or the human resource team. What would, let's say that you join a company and you're CPO, what does Simon Sinek's kind of HR strategy look like to actually foster the type of leadership that you've spoken so much about?

Simon Sinek:

Well, first of all, I don't like the term manager. Nobody wants to come to work to be managed. You can manage a project, you can manage a process, you can manage the outcome of something else, but people want to be led. We want to come to work to be led. Nobody wants to come to work to be managed. So I think that's a big part of it, which is we have to empower people to recognise that leadership doesn't come with rank or position. Leadership comes when you act like a leader. When you demonstrate the characteristics of leadership, then you are a leader and it requires no rank or authority. What rank and authority provides you is the opportunity to lead at greater scale. So I think that's a big part of it, to let people know that anyone can be a leader and everyone can choose to be the leader they wish they had.

Damon Klotz:

So these questions, feel free to answer them in an out breath. Is purpose something you find or does it find you?

Simon Sinek:

Both? It depends. Yeah.

Damon Klotz:

Is it arrogant and ignorant to assume that we are here on this planet for a purpose?

Simon Sinek:

No.

Damon Klotz:

Why not?

Simon Sinek:

It was one breath.

Damon Klotz:

Good. That was a test.

Simon Sinek:

We're human beings and one of the basic universal truths of being human is our deep desire to feel like we belong to something, right? We're tribal animals. We want to feel safe. We want to feel like we can go out and provide for ourselves and for our families, and we want to feel like we belong. Those are basic three basic human truths.

Damon Klotz:

Outside of your own books, if you were to recommend one book for the national curriculum, which one would you recommend?

Simon Sinek:

Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl and How to Talk to Kids So Kids Will Listen. It's another, it's more practical.

Damon Klotz:

Who's the author of that one?

Simon Sinek:

I don't know, but it's a bright yellow book. It's a parenting book, but it's so good for businesses as well.

Damon Klotz:

Interesting. If I really knew Simon Sinek, I would know

Simon Sinek:

That who I am publicly and who I am privately are the same.

Damon Klotz:

Does that surprise people?

Simon Sinek:

Sometimes? Yeah. I meet people backstage and they go, you're nice. I'm like, what did you expect?

Damon Klotz:

Besides that? Is there another common misconception?

Simon Sinek:

You'd have to ask the people who have misconceptions of me. I don't know. Yeah.

Damon Klotz:

If you could have influence over any company in the world that's going to have the biggest impact on society, which one would it be?

Simon Sinek:

Big tech. It's the Facebooks, it's the Googles, it's the Amazons that have massive influence in our lives and our lives are these days fully integrated into their companies, into their products.

Damon Klotz:

Do you have any sort of fears in terms of the role that big tech is playing in our lives, or do you actually see it as a force for good?

Simon Sinek:

It's about balance. It's not an either or. I mean, alcohol's fun, but not if you drink too much of it. Of course tech has good, but tech that like any monopoly, like any dictatorship that has too much power and too much influence, balance is the key. And I think we're either in or approaching a place where it's becoming unbalanced.

Damon Klotz:

And so later today, you're going to be speaking to an audience at Culture First. These are mainly made up of people either interested in people and culture or directly responsible for the people and culture at their companies. What actually got you excited about having the chance to speak to over a thousand people who are playing this role for their company?

Simon Sinek:

Well, I imagine a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe when they're at work and return home fulfilled at the end of the day. So the opportunity to come talk to an audience like this, these are the people who are going to directly impact the cultures of these organisations. In other words, they're going to create that sense of safety and inspiration and fulfilment. And so we are part of the same army here. So it's a thrill for me to come and talk to people who we're all trying to do the same thing.

Damon Klotz:

As I reflect back on this conversation, one idea that stuck with me was the power of branding yourself something bigger than a job title.

At a BBQ at the weekend or at a conference, you’ll meet someone one new and hear something like this. Hi, my name is Damon and I’m a marketer, a designer, an architect, a doctor.

I understand why we do it. Labels help us make assumptions about people and they provide us with context when meeting someone.

But should it be our default way of learning about someone?

What Simon shared with me today is that his title might change from consultant, to author or to speaker. But when Simon calls himself an optimist, that’s something that won’t change. Because it’s not tied to his work, it’s tied to his why.

I read a story recently about why Simon uses the colour orange in his branding and wears a little bit of it on his person. He said, because when he sees orange, it’s a reminder to be the bright and optimistic version of himself. We all need reminders from time to time, even when we deeply know what our why is.

This made me reflect on the title that I’d be happy to call myself today that I hope will never change.

For me, that’s storyteller. It’s connected to my own why, which is my belief that we are all one conversation away from changing the rest of our life.

So I want to thank Simon for reminding me of that.

In each episode I try to leave you with a takeaway that will make your organization 10% better.

For this episode it’s going to be focused on a powerful prompt to use in your 1:1 conversations.

During your next 1:1 when you’re discussing your projects, your goals and your desired future state, ask yourself, to what end.

You want to become a team lead, to what end? Because you want to manage a team, or do you want more respect from your peers? Do you want to lead a team because you really want to coach and support others, or are you wanting greater financial resources to provide for others at home.

The question to what end is a powerful way to get underneath the decisions and the desires that we think we want, and helps us understand why we want to do that. In our day to day busyness, I understand there’s not always time for that. But I think your relationship with your work, your manager and yourself will be 10% better if you stop yourself and ask, to what end.