A Deep Dive into Leaders Eat Last

Have you ever wondered what sets great leaders apart?

I did.

And for the last couple of years, I’ve read many books on leadership. Some simply summarize common knowledge, others propose new frameworks (that can be tough to implement), and so forth.

Out of all the leadership books I’ve read, one stood out: “Leaders Eat Last” by Simon Sinek. He uncovers the secrets to inspiring teams and building trust.

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

I liked it so much that I decided to do an in-depth book summary based on my reading notes.

Let’s dive into it.

Quick summary for those in a hurry

Why should leaders eat last?

It is because your main job is to be there for your team. If you put short-term gains and profits first, this is not a viable strategy - you should approach leadership with an infinite mindset.

What are the traits of a great leader?

• She creates a (physically and psychologically) safe environment for her team.
• A great leader doesn’t manage solely based on numbers. He communicates openly with his team and considers their opinions when making decisions.
• She makes time for employees. It’s not just about having a brief small talk here and there - it is more about really taking the time, engaging in deeper discussions, and discussing their obstacles openly.
• A great leader creates a culture of collaboration.

Power

Power can have a negative tint to it if you think of leadership. It radiates a feeling of dominance, but this is not what this chapter is about.

It is more about bringing power to the team.

Enablement.

Safety

People need to feel safe.

This not only means covering basic needs for physical safety (like Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs suggests) but also includes psychological safety. Only if security is guaranteed (no attacks from within) can teams be innovative and creative. Only then will teams dare to take risks.

And trust is crucial in well-performing teams.

When trust and mutual empathy are present, team members support each other, leading to extraordinary results. You as a manager, however, must start:

• Trust employees
• Show empathy
• Meet at eye-level

Trust is good and if you ask managers, most would say that it exists in their teams.

However, it is a fact that about 80 % of people are dissatisfied with their job. Although many would like to change jobs, they don’t because they are afraid that it will be the same elsewhere, in line with the quote:

“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

Too little trust can cause stress - a common cause of job dissatisfaction. You might think managers are more stressed than their employees, but it’s the opposite. Stress mainly happens when people feel they have no control over their work.

Employees who only follow instructions without any say in what they do experience more stress.

The greater the self-determination in the job, the lower the stress and the greater the job satisfaction.

E.D.S.O and C

E.D.S.O stands for the hormones Endorphine, Dopamine, Serotonin, and Oxytocin - all relevant to human behavior.

Let’s have a brief look into why they are important in the context of leadership:

• Endorphine: It makes you feel good as it is an endogenous opiate released to suppress pain. For example, the “runner’s high” is also caused by this hormone.
• Dopamine: Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that is released when we achieve a goal (e.g. have picked an apple from a tree). Dopamine is omnipresent in our modern world due to satisfaction just being one click away (social media is a big dopamine trigger). It can also be addictive (alcohol, nicotine, gambling, …). However, dopamine is also released when we achieve partial goals and thus helps us to persevere.
• Serotonin: Serotonin is the messenger substance of leadership. It is released, for example, when we receive awards (e.g. when we are honored, are cited by others, or even when we get new Instagram followers). Ultimately, it helps us to do things that increase our status.
• Oxytocin: This is the “love hormone.” It is released when we help someone. The cool thing is, however, that it is also released in the person we help and even in those who watch the selfless deed. Furthermore, oxytocin is released during physical contact (e.g. a mother with her baby, or shaking hands).

The E.D.S.O are positive hormones and it is important to keep them in mind.

There is, however, one more important messenger substance that is very common in the world of business: the big C stands for Cortisol - the “stress hormone”.

Cortisol is responsible for putting us on alert (e.g. when we hear a noise or suspect danger). If an exceptional situation then arises, adrenaline follows, which enables us to either flee or face the danger. It definitely has its merits, however, in modern office situations we cannot just run away or fight the foe.

And that’s a problem.

In a working environment where you don’t feel safe, cortisol is released. This in turn leads to reduced performance. You cannot break down the hormone again (as you don’t engage physically). This means that you end up with an increased cortisol level which leads to health problems.

Why we need leaders

The fact that humans build hierarchical environments comes from our beginnings.

Simon Sinek explains that in the Stone Age, having a hierarchy was crucial for sharing food. Without it, everyone eating at once would’ve led to fights. The hierarchy made it clear who got to eat and when.

An alpha was allowed to eat first. This, however, also came with expectations: alphas were the first to go into battle (after all, they were the best fed).

This contradicts the book title, right?

However, leaders eating last means that they actively decide to eat last when it is the best for the team. It means making sure that your staff are cared for before you take care of yourself.

Hierarchies are not just a Stone Age thing, they have continued to this day.

We treat alpha people with wealth and a serotonin boost. But this does not come without a price. In return, we expect leaders to stand up for us: we expect them to stand up for the team and protect them (e.g. from other departments, upper management, etc.).

This can mean that we trust a good leader to even break (or at least bend) the rules when necessary.

Rules are a construct that we have created for “standard operation”. When creating rules, it is not possible to think of all eventualities. It is therefore necessary to break rules in exceptional situations.

Path

A brief history of leadership

The way how we lead has evolved over the past generations.

The “greatest” generation (the Boomers’ parents’ generation) is characterized by cooperation.

Why?

They grew up during the Depression and served in World War II. Cooperation was simply a necessity to make ends meet during these hard times.

This changed with the Baby Boomers.

As they increasingly moved up in their careers, selfishness also moved into companies. Mass layoffs were legitimized when Ronald Regan laid off 11,000 air traffic controllers in one swoop in August 1989. Many managers saw this measure as legitimizing them to do the same in their companies.

The pressure in many workplaces increased as people feared being seen as redundant.

This comes with a price though: pressure is poison for cooperation and innovation. The long-term success of an organization is traded for short-term gains.

Millennials already took over a lot of the leadership positions and this will increase as the Boomers are moving into retirement.

What changes will that bring us?

Abstraction kills

With Abstraction, Simon Sinek refers to a distance from people

If decisions are made (only) based on numbers, without proximity to the people who are affected, the decisions are often made without empathy and consideration of the people. Hence, violating people’s sense of security.

The famous Milgram experiment is an illustrative example of that: In the experiment, there are teachers and students. The teachers are told that they are participating in an experiment that analyzes reinforcement and punishment in the context of learning ability. When students answer wrong, the teachers have to electrocute them.

However, students are professional actors and accomplices of the experimenters - no real electroshocks are delivered.

What the study wants to analyze is: how far people are willing to go when asked by a superior.

During the experiment, the experimenters asked the teachers to increase the voltage. They ask again and again up to a point where it becomes dangerous (which is even written down on the regulator).

The results are terrifying: When the teacher and student are in the same room, and the teacher has to place the student’s hand on the electrodes, most teachers stop the experiment early. But the further away the teachers are, the stronger the electric shocks they give. If the teacher is in a different room and can only hear the student’s voice, they keep going, even when the student is crying and begging them to stop.

What does this have to do with leadership?

It means that you should be as close to your team as possible and not just make decisions based on numbers. If this happens and employees lose their sense of security, their motivation and ability to innovate plummets.

How can we remove abstraction?

Human interaction becomes less effective in larger groups. To manage larger abstraction becomes a necessity (otherwise it wouldn’t be manageable). There even exists a magic number about group sizes: it’s called Dunbar’s number.

It is 150.

We work best in groups of fewer than 150 people.

The founder of GoreTex knew this and designed his factories so that no more than 150 people worked together in each one.

Time > Money

Giving a person time weighs far more than giving money.

This goes back to our evolution. In the past, people needed to help us and spend their energy on us, which made us more willing to do the same for them.

It’s still true today.

When managers give their time, listen, and solve problems with their team, it means more than just giving out a big bonus.

Leadership lessons

Leadership lesson 1: as goes the culture, so goes the organization

Corporate culture is an important aspect of leadership.

Goldman Sachs is a negative example: they went from a good corporate culture to a bad one, because they were chasing short-term success.

3M, on the other hand, is a positive example. They established a corporate culture where employees are rewarded when they collaborate. The majority of 3M’s patents were therefore also achieved by more than one person.

Leadership lesson 2: like the boss, like the culture

In this lesson, Simon Sinek takes us on a journey to meet two leaders with different strategies.

• One of them gradually rose to become the No. 1 of a large investment bank - for him, his personal success was paramount and he propagated a corporate culture that was all about competition (including between employees). In the course of the 2008 financial crisis, the company suffered a severe setback and the CEO had to resign. The failure was facilitated by the culture.
• The story of submarine captain Marquet is different. Captain Marquet starts with an authoritarian leadership style (strict orders, no self-thinking of subordinates), but quickly realizes that he lacks the information to make all decisions himself (he was trained for another boat). He begins to adapt his leadership style and delegates decisions to his subordinates. As a result of this strategy, the crew of the boat developed greatly and went from being one of the lowest-rated crews to the most successful and highest-rated crew in the entire Navy.

What is the lesson of the two stories?

A leader has a vital role in shaping a culture to become a safe environment for employees to thrive.

And if they thrive, so does the whole organization.

Leadership lesson 3: integrity matters

Integrity means more than honesty.

It also means standing by your attitude even if it doesn’t work to your advantage.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu tells the story of a particular integer leader. In his regiment, he had the rule that soldiers who pillage and destroy are punished rigorously. One day, his horse ran off the path and trampled a field, destroying many plants.

To punish himself for this, the leader decided he should be executed. His soldiers convinced him that he shouldn’t do it, but nevertheless, he ordered them to punish him rigorously and to cut all his hair off.

People (and especially managers) with integrity are perceived by others as particularly trustworthy.

It is therefore important to be and act with integrity to build trust.

Leadership lesson 4: friends are important

Personal relationships also lead to professional relationships going well.

One example of this is the American Congress. Back when Democrats and Republicans still spent more time in Washington, they were more likely to find consensus than in recent years, where they tend to spend more time in their home states.

How can you facilitate that as a leader?

Team events can be a very powerful strategy to glue your team together.

But also just semi-regularly sitting together for lunch and having an informal chat can boost the relationships within your team.

Leadership lesson 5: lead people, not numbers

After Milton Friedman’s Shareholder Value Theory, business shifted in this direction.

It became the ultimate goal to increase shareholder value at any cost, even if that meant laying off some employees before the end of the year.

GE did that.

Under the leadership of Jack Welch, GE’s primary goal was to increase shareholder value. The company was doing very well. But when Welch stepped down, the long-term consequences caught up with GE, and the company struggled.

When a company’s leadership puts shareholder value above all else, the organization becomes dependent on geniuses at the top. There is no doubt that there can be still good decisions made and that a company can run profitably.

However, the organization cannot do this on its own. If there is a change in management, the consequences can be disastrous.

A positive example is Costco: the company always treated all employees as its most important resource, paid them fairly, and thus managed to achieve long-term success.

If management focuses on people and creates a secure and stable environment the result is a resilient organization that can manage crisis on its own.

Reason

From dependence to independence

Let’s go back to E.D.S.O. for a second.

In the last decades, we have created systems geared towards short-term gratification - we are dopamine-driven.

We depend on dopamine and we need it fast.

This needs to change.

Instead of short-term goals (e.g. shareholder value) we must focus on long-term growth and success, like Jeff Sinegal did at Costco.

Big goals

Small organizations are often much more innovative than large companies.

Why?

Relative to the organization’s size, upcoming problems or projects are much bigger - so big that everyone has to pull together. You as a leader need to define big goals.

It’s like the bold objective of Microsoft.

Put a PC on every desk in the world.

And now tell me: did they achieve it?

Step 12: take responsibility

Step 12 comes from the Alcoholics Anonymous program and is the last and most important step: it says that you should help other alcoholics to give up alcohol.

This responsibility triggers the hormones Serotonin and Oxytocin and strengthens relationships within the group. Simon Sinek generalizes this step 12:

By taking responsibility within a group and working for the good of others, we can improve the circle of safety. - Simon Sinek

Let’s all be better leaders!

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Thank you so much for reading my deep dive into Leaders Eat Last.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my article and learned something. If you like in-depth book summaries, and personal stories but also enjoy short-form articles please drop by again. I usually publish new articles every Thursday and Sunday.

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Cheers, Matthias