REQUISITE HR BOOK CLUB, OCTOBER 2016
Issue 5
42
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Requisite HR Book Club October 2016 LEADERS EAT LAST BY SIMON SINEK
Welcome to the latest Requisite HR Book Club share. We will be continuing with Leaders Eat Last (Why some teams pull together and others don’t) by Simon Sinek (author of Start with Why) Part 3 – REALITY Chapter 9 - The Courage to do the Right Thing Starts with an example of Knowing When to Break the Rules. The example is of an experienced Air Traffic Controller who had to negotiate the descent of a destressed aircraft filled with 126 people, through restricted airspace. He brought the aircraft safety past four other aircraft in flight and in the process broke the rules around the space that must be maintained around aircraft in flight. He disobeyed the clear lines set to ensure the safety of the millions of passengers that fly every year. However, he did this because he knew that keeping people alive was more important than maintaining those boundaries. When we place trust in our team members, we must not only trust them to obey the rules, we must also trust that they know when to break them. Rules are put in place for normal operations. The rules are designed to avoid danger and help ensure that things go smoothly. And though there are guidelines for how to deal with emergencies, at the end of the day, we trust the expertise of a special few people to know when to break the rules.
CHAPTERS NINE AND TEN
We cannot “trust” rules or technology. We can rely on them, but we cannot trust them, as trust is a special human experience produced by oxytocin in response to acts performed for our behalf that serve to protect and maintain safety. True trust can only exist among people. And we can only trust others when we know they are actively and consciously concerned about us. Rulebooks, no matter how comprehensive, cannot consider every eventuality. When the people we deal with default to rules with no consideration for the people for whom the rules where designed to help or protect, then we feel that they don’t care nor are they truly concerned about us and our welfare. The true social benefit of trust must be reciprocal. One-way trust is not beneficial to an individual or the group. What good is a company in which management trusts it’s team, but the team does not trust the management. Trust must go both ways for the system to work. Leaders are responsible for teaching the rules, training to create competency, and building confidence in their team. After this is done the leader must step back and trust that their people know what they are doing and will do what needs to be done. A strong organisation is one in which people will break the rule not for personal gain but because it is the right thing to do for others.
When people feel that they have the control to do what is right, even when it means breaking the rules, then they will more likely do the right thing. But our confidence to do what is right is determine by how trusted we feel by our leader, and whether we trust our leader to protect us because we broke the rules. People who are in fear of getting in trouble or losing their jobs are more likely to follow the rules, instead of doing what needs to be done. Your Chapter Challenges: 1. Do you trust your Team? If not have you: a. Taught the rules? b. Created team competency? c. Built team confidence? 2. Defined and educate your team on what trumps your rules. Should it be the potential loss of a client? Or one of your company values like safety or customer Service? Chapter 10 - Snowmobile in the Desert Our intelligence (thank you neocortex!) gives us ideas and instructions, but it is our ability to cooperate that actually helps us to get things done (thank you limbic brain!). Nothing of real value on this earth was built by one person without the help of others. It is clear that the more people want to help us the more we can achieve. We have built systems and organisations that force the human animal to work in environments in which they do not work best.
If the human being is a snowmobile, this means we were designed to operate in very specific conditions. Now take that machine designed for one kind of condition – snow – and put it in another condition – the desert, for example – and it won’t operate well. Sure the snowmobile will go, it just won’t go as easily or as well as if it were in the right conditions. This is what many organisations do. When progress is slow or innovation is lacking. Leaders tinker with the machine. They hire and fire in the hopes of getting the right mix, they develop new kinds of incentives to encourage the machine to work harder. Now although the machine will indeed work harder and maybe even go a little faster in the desert, the friction will be great. The point is that the machine (aka people) are not the problem. They are fine – it is the environment in which the people operate that is the problem. Get that right and things just go. To the social animal Trust is like lubrication. It reduced friction and creates conditions much more conducive to performance, just like putting the snowmobile back in snow. Do that and even an underpowered snowmobile will run circles around the most powerful snowmobile in the wrong conditions. It is not how smart the people in the organisation are; it’s how well they work together that is the true indicator of future success or the ability to manage through struggle. Trust and commitment are feelings that we get from the release of chemical incentives deep in our limbic brain, as such they are hard to measure. Just as we can’t simply tell someone to be happy and expect it to happen, we can’t just tell someone to trust us or to omit to something and expect that they will. There are all sorts of things we need to do first before someone will feel any sense of loyalty or devotion. Your Chapter Challenges: 1. What type of work environment is best suited to your team members? 2. How can you change the work environment in which your team operate, to make it better suited for your team members?
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