PDF Summary:Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek

All leaders have responsibilities they have to manage, from motivating their subordinates to planning the long-term trajectory of their company. But which of these responsibilities is the most essential to success? In Leaders Eat Last, author and inspirational speaker Simon Sinek argues that a leader’s primary responsibility is to prioritize her subordinates’ needs above her own. In business, this usually manifests as a manager prioritizing her employees’ needs above immediate profit. By empathizing with her employees, she creates a supportive environment that encourages them to collaborate and find innovative ways to support the whole group, helping the company—and its leader—to be more successful.

In this guide, we’ll examine Sinek’s theories on leadership, including his suggestions on how to strengthen supportive environments and the role that brain chemistry plays in doing so. We’ll also compare and contrast his ideas with recent neuropsychological breakthroughs and the advice of business experts like Ken Blanchard and Sheldon M. Bowles (Raving Fans).

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Cortisol Hinders Collaboration and Innovation

According to Sinek, a neurochemical called cortisol is the reason people stop collaborating and innovating when they feel unsafe. Also known as the stress hormone, cortisol sends your body into survival mode when you’re threatened. It shuts down any non-essential bodily functions so your brain can identify the threat as quickly as possible.

(Shortform note: Shutting down non-essential bodily functions may help you identify danger, as Sinek suggests, but what if you need to focus on something other than your unsafe feelings? For example, if your child gets lost in a busy mall, you need to be calm and focused to find them, despite the cortisol in your system. If you’re panicking, you may just run around the mall without a plan and not find your child. If you’re calm and focused, you can contact mall security and retrace your steps. To bypass the fight-or-flight response, experts suggest taking deep breaths, acknowledging your feelings of worry and fear, and asking yourself whether these feelings are helpful. This forces you to consider your situation logically, which can reduce cortisol levels and make it easier to focus.)

One of the functions cortisol impedes is oxytocin production. This means when employees feel stressed or unsafe at work, they lack the oxytocin that would otherwise encourage them to feel empathy and form trusting relationships. As such, they’re much less likely to collaborate, instead seeing each other as competitors and threats to their own success.

(Shortform note: The competition caused by a lack of oxytocin that Sinek warns about can make a workplace miserable. Competitive subordinates may belittle their coworkers, take credit for other people’s work, or act like a manager even if they’re not one. These are likely attempts to get attention and support. Experts suggest dealing with a competitive person in the workplace by being direct: Confront the competitive individual and explain how their behavior is impacting you and their peers. Focus on the competitiveness as a problem that you’ll solve together to encourage teamwork rather than defensiveness. In addition, show them that there’s no need for competition by continuing to support and encourage them.)

Cortisol also prevents your employees from innovating: It impedes their ability to focus on things other than identifying whatever made them feel unsafe. When humans identify a physical threat, our bodies release adrenaline, which Sinek implies flushes the cortisol from our systems and alleviates our feelings of insecurity. Unfortunately, most of modern humanity’s threats are abstract, like having too much responsibility at work. When your employees can’t identify a physical danger, their bodies don't release adrenaline and the cortisol stays in their systems longer, distracting them from creating innovative solutions to problems.

(Shortform note: Sinek presents losing creativity as the main downside to having cortisol in your system for a long time. However, arguably a more pressing problem is the physiological effects of this cortisol response. As cortisol builds in your system, your body gets stuck in ‘production’ mode: Instead of listening to your brain’s signals to stop producing the stress hormone, your body keeps pumping out cortisol. This state of chronic stress damages your immune system and puts you at higher risk for depression.)

How to Strengthen Supportive Environments

Now that we’ve explored the importance of supportive environments, we’ll examine a few of Sinek’s strategies you can use to strengthen your company’s supportive environment and encourage trust, collaboration, and innovation.

Strategy #1: Prioritize Long-Term Goals

As discussed, oxytocin helps you create a supportive environment by forging empathetic connections between you and your subordinates. Sinek believes that you can encourage oxytocin production in both your employees and yourself by prioritizing long-term goals. For example, instead of focusing on your company’s profits for this year, plan how you’ll impact the market for the next five. This puts your decisions in the context of causing lasting positive change, rather than immediate, temporary success.

Types of Long-term Goals

According to Jerry I. Porras and Jim Collins in Built to Last, there are four kinds of long-term goals:

• Ambition goals, where you focus on meeting a quantitative target (for example, a burger franchise selling 100 million burgers in 10 years)

• Challenger goals, where you focus on beating or replacing a competitor (for instance, a new browser company becoming more used than Google)

• Icon goals, where you focus on emulating a successful company (for example, a small animation studio becoming as successful as Pixar)

• Refresher goals, where you focus on shifting your current flawed products or reputation to something more profitable and respected (for instance, making high-quality, leather notebooks instead of flimsy paperback ones)

Porras and Collins say that these kinds of long-term goals take 10 to 30 years to complete and require a lot of commitment and teamwork. This could explain Sinek’s belief that focusing on long-term goals can increase oxytocin production: By instituting this kind of goal, you require your subordinates to spend a lot of time working together to fulfill it. Working together is a form of social contact which, as Sinek explains above, increases oxytocin production.

Prioritizing Short-Term Goals Stifles Oxytocin

According to Sinek, a major reason you should prioritize long-term goals is the drawbacks of the alternative: prioritizing short-term goals. Fulfilling short-term goals encourages your body to produce dopamine, rather than oxytocin. Dopamine is a neurochemical that motivates and rewards you for completing tasks by providing happy feelings, much like oxytocin. However, while oxytocin motivates you to form relationships—a long-term goal, since relationships take time to form—dopamine motivates you to complete short-term tasks—for example, writing a report—and is immediately produced in large amounts.

(Shortform note: Experts say that part of dopamine’s motivational nature is improved memory: When you successfully complete a short-term goal, you first feel happy, then the dopamine helps your brain store the memory of that happiness. This memory motivates you to try again and reminds you how to succeed the next time you attempt that task. Dopamine-enhanced memory is a good thing, in that it helps you learn and succeed more easily in the future, but it can also have a negative influence, as it can form bad habits by motivating you to repeat unhealthy behaviors.)

Many people neglect their oxytocin production because it takes time to compound and make them happy. Instead, they focus on producing as much instant gratification through dopamine as possible. For leaders at work, this focus on instant gratification manifests as fixating on the company’s daily operations while neglecting how those daily decisions influence your subordinates or the company’s long-term goals, Sinek implies. The more fixated on producing dopamine you are, the less oxytocin you produce, the less empathetic you are, and the weaker your company’s supportive environment becomes.

(Shortform note: Another problematic element of seeking instant gratification is growing a tolerance to dopamine: If you rely only on dopamine to make you feel happy, you’ll be tempted to continually trigger your brain to produce more. However, the more you trigger dopamine production, the less effective it becomes and the more you have to escalate your dopamine-seeking behavior—for example, starting to use drugs—to feel happy. Fortunately, you may be able to reset your dopamine tolerance through fasting: If you don’t trigger dopamine production for a while, your brain will be much more sensitive to it when you do experience it next.)

Strategy #2: Unite Against Common Hardship

Another strategy you can use to strengthen supportive environments is uniting against common hardship, Sinek says. Facing hardship as a group increases oxytocin production: Your brain rewards you for collaborating with your subordinates and coworkers in a threatening situation, and these higher oxytocin levels strengthen the supportive environment.

(Shortform note: Sinek says that oxytocin production increases when you collaborate with others in a threatening environment. Is this any different from collaborating in a non-threatening situation? Experts say yes. When you experience hardship, your brain is more engaged: You must monitor the threat, think of solutions to the problem, and work with others to enact those solutions. This state of heightened engagement means you remember the connections you forged during the threatening experience better than you would those from a non-threatening experience. Since your brain rewards you for forming connections, these strong memories trigger higher levels of oxytocin.)

Most companies unite against common hardship by nurturing a higher purpose. Sinek explains that a higher purpose is similar to a long-term goal in that it takes time and company-wide cooperation to complete. However, higher purposes are more abstract than long-term goals: They usually provide a sense of meaning beyond making profits or dominating a field, and they don’t have concrete timelines for completion. When you and your subordinates are devoted to fulfilling this kind of purpose, the possibility that you’ll fail to do so becomes enough of a threat to encourage collaboration and strengthen the supportive environment.

The Difficulty of Nurturing a Higher Purpose

Many leaders struggle to nurture a higher purpose for their company. Experts say this difficulty arises because these leaders view work as a contract and their subordinates as self-interested and only willing to do the bare minimum.

This is a problematic mindset because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The leaders believe their subordinates are self-interested and need to be motivated to do their jobs well, so they provide constant external motivation—for example, giving raises to people who improve their profits by 5% a year. The subordinates focus on fulfilling each goal their leaders suggest so they can receive the rewards associated with each goal, rather than looking for opportunities to improve their skills or form healthy working relationships. In turn, the leaders see that everyone is only doing the bare minimum of what’s asked of them and believe they’ve been proven right, so they rely even more on controlling their subordinates through external motivation.

To solve this problem, the leaders must shift their mindset: Rather than thinking of their subordinates as externally motivated, they must remember that people want to be engaged at work because it makes their work life more fulfilling and enjoyable. This can motivate them to nurture a higher purpose that engages and motivates their subordinates without requiring external motivation or rewards.

Higher Purposes Must Be Currently Unachievable and Selfless

Sinek explains that there are two conditions your higher purpose must meet to effectively encourage your group to unite:

1. Your company can’t currently have the resources to fulfill the higher purpose. If your higher purpose is easily fulfilled, Sinek says it doesn’t provide the necessary pressure to inspire cooperation and oxytocin production. Your company needs to continually struggle to fulfill the higher purpose. This struggle applies constant external pressure, which inspires your subordinates to collaborate and experiment with innovative ways of fulfilling the higher purpose.

The Positive Pressure of Creative Tension

The constant external pressure caused by an unfulfilled higher purpose is also called “creative tension.” Creative tension motivates you to complete your goals through cognitive dissonance: You know what you want to do, and you know that you’re not currently doing it. Your brain dislikes this contrast and motivates you to close the gap between your desires and reality.

You can encourage this powerful motivational tool in yourself by clearly articulating your higher purpose and the ways your current reality contrasts that purpose. Articulating this in writing can be helpful because writing forces your brain to be detailed and look at your ideas in new and creative ways. It also helps you remember your goals better, which means your creative tension and motivation will last longer.

2. The higher purpose must serve others. Selflessness is an important element of an effective higher purpose because it’s inspirational, and inspired people work harder and are more dedicated. Sinek implies that helping others is inspirational because it prompts your brain to release higher levels of oxytocin. The happy feelings oxytocin provides motivate you and your subordinates to continue working hard and helping others.

On the other hand, selfish goals, like becoming a leader in your industry or making a certain amount of profit, won’t inspire your employees because that goal only benefits the company, which doesn’t release oxytocin.

Amazon’s vision statement is a good example of an effective higher purpose: “to be earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online…” Amazon can’t immediately fulfill this vision because “be the most customer-centric” and “be where customers can find anything they want” aren’t static goals: Amazon must adjust its approach as technology advances and people’s expectations for customer service and products change. Thus, Amazon constantly innovates new customer service initiatives and adds products to its stores, attempting to meet that goal. In addition, Amazon’s higher purpose serves others, as the company helps customers find the products they need, which inspires its employees.

Can Selfish Goals Inspire Employees?

Sinek says that selfish goals can’t inspire employees to work harder or be more dedicated. However, Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues in Skin in the Game that this depends on the employees’ compensation model: Employees with a fixed salary aren't directly affected by generating more profit for the company, so they’re not motivated to do so. By this logic, employees who rely on commissions are motivated to gain more money—their pay is less secure, so they work harder and more efficiently. Thus, it is possible to motivate employees with a selfish goal.

However, this is motivation caused by financial reward, rather than inspiration, which is caused by oxytocin. Whereas the hard work and dedication caused by motivation only last as long as the monetary benefits do, inspiration provides long-term motivation that’s based on helping others and overall happiness. Thus, focus on encouraging inspiration to motivate employees long-term, rather than relying on a financial incentive: They’ll be happier and more productive regardless of their compensation model.

Strategy #3: Combat Abstraction

Sinek explains that combating abstraction means forcing yourself and your subordinates to see your customers, suppliers, and each other as people rather than abstract ideas. This is another way to strengthen supportive environments. As discussed, oxytocin is released through social contact, especially physical contact such as shaking hands. When you don’t have social contact with other people, you stop producing oxytocin and therefore stop feeling empathy for those people: They become abstract ideas rather than people.

When that happens, your focus shifts to what you can understand concretely: your own safety. For company leaders, this usually manifests as making decisions that maximize profits without considering how those decisions will affect consumers and employees. For employees, this manifests as following orders, even if the company or customers would be harmed by those orders. Thus, everyone focuses only on their own benefit, rather than supporting each other or helping the company grow, destroying the supportive environment.

How to Combat Abstraction

In today’s globalized world, most companies don’t have social contact with their customers, suppliers, or even employees, but that doesn’t have to cause a shift to abstraction. Sinek recommends a couple of methods for combating abstraction and strengthening your supportive environment:

1. Interact with your suppliers, employees, and customers in person as much as possible, and help your subordinates do the same, Sinek says. Doing so reminds you that you’re working with people and gives your brain the opportunity to produce oxytocin and form trusting relationships.

(Shortform note: Sinek points out that interacting with people in person helps your productivity by strengthening the supportive environment. Ken Blanchard and Sheldon M. Bowles suggest in Raving Fans that these kinds of interactions can be profitable in a more immediate way as well: When you continually interact with your customers, suppliers, and coworkers, you give them the opportunity to provide feedback. They can alert you to any potential issues and help you adjust your processes and customer service to be the most profitable and productive possible.)

2. Interact with people you’ve helped. As discussed above, inspiration encourages hard work and determination. Seeing the positive effect your efforts have on others inspires you to continue in those efforts. This is why volunteering at a soup kitchen can feel more fulfilling than donating money: Volunteering is more concrete and feels more meaningful.

Abstraction and Empathy Fatigue

While distance can certainly cause you to start seeing others as abstractions rather than people, as Sinek says, experts warn that spending too much time with others can do the same thing. When you spend a lot of time helping people through highly stressful situations, you develop “empathy fatigue.” Also known as secondary traumatic stress disorder—since you witness someone else experiencing a trauma, rather than experiencing it yourself—empathy fatigue is a state of stress and exhaustion where you become unable to care about or empathize with others.

Empathy fatigue likely results from a combination of cortisol and oxytocin. As discussed above, oxytocin allows you to feel empathy—where you understand a situation as if you were the person experiencing that situation. When you form empathetic connections with people going through stressful or traumatic experiences, your body starts producing cortisol and you feel that stress and trauma yourself. When this occurs, you’re more likely to withdraw from those empathetic connections: You stop empathizing in an attempt to protect yourself, which reduces other people to abstract ideas rather than people.

Thus, while interacting with people you’ve helped, as Sinek suggests, can inspire and motivate you, be cautious. Be mindful of how helping others is affecting you emotionally, and remember to practice self-care through eating healthily, getting enough sleep, and spending time doing things you enjoy. In addition, interacting with loved ones who aren’t going through stressful or traumatic experiences can help overcome empathy fatigue.