Leadership and the importance of gardening. Review of the book Start with Why – How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, by Simon Sinek

Companies are thousands of people deep. Leaders alone can’t pull all the strings or push all the buttons to make everything work properly.

The same applies to life, it’s impossible to control all the variables.

To build the future, leaders must rely on the brains and management skills of others.

Correspondingly, in life we must rely on others to support our dreams. We don’t have to do it alone. Truly, we can’t do it alone.

Let me explain why, with the help of Simon Sinek:

In our personal and professional lives, one can try to be either a chess master or a gardener.

Imagine someone with enough brainpower to rationalize everything. Picture someone who thinks he or she knows all the answers. Such person would want to centralize every move – to control all possible outcomes. He or she would lead in the very same way – would strive to control all the results, centralize power, define the strategy, outline the tactics, outthink every variable. Meet the chess master.

Now, imagine someone whose desire is to foster others – who shares their cause – by cultivating the perfect environment.

Seeding...

Watering…

Fertilizing…

…making sure everyone has space to be creative, to develop, and to improve. He or she leads in the very same way: focuses on the purpose of others and ensures the environment is fertile for cooperation. Furthermore, he or she does not try to control the outcome; instead, promotes the vision of the company and hopes the cultivation of the culture flourishes into something bigger. Meet the gardener.

It’s pretty obvious the kind of leadership I prefer.

Before we finish the year-end message, I would like to go back to the book and further explore the different types of gardeners, i.e. leaders. Simon Sinek developed a golden circle model to distinguish between the different types of leadership and to explain how a company communicates with the marketplace. ‘The leader sitting at the top of the organization is the inspiration, the symbol of the reason we do what we do.’

These aforementioned leaders are ‘why-types, they are the visionaries, the ones with the overactive imaginations. They tend to be optimists who believe that all the things they imagine can actually be accomplished. Why-types are focused on the things most people can’t see, like the future’.

There are also the leaders who connect such a vision to the reality – to the marketplace. They are ‘how-types and live more in the here and now. They are realists and have a clear sense of all things practical. How-types are focused on things most people can see and tend to be better at building structures, processes and getting things done’.

Considering the case in which each of these leaders has a comprehensive self-awareness of their mindset and skills, together, it seems, they are much more effective. Finding such partners is hard and can take a lifetime, but once you do, make sure to hold on tight. Make sure you work hard every day to leverage said relationship to build something bigger.

Make sure you combine the why, the how, and the what to inspire. Do so in a way that ensures all of the associates of the company feel like they belong. Better yet, aim higher: strive to instill a sense of belonging throughout the entire value chain, from suppliers to customers. In the end, it’s all ‘about feeling like we belong’.

It’s a never ending game of energy and charisma. ‘Energy motivates but charisma inspires. Energy is easy to see, easy to measure and easy to copy. Charisma is hard to define, near impossible to measure and too elusive to copy. All great leaders have charisma because all great leaders have clarity of why; and undying belief in a purpose or cause bigger than themselves’.

‘If people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it’.

‘The difference is, when you start with why, you know full well that the chocolate cake is a short-term decision that doesn’t fit your beliefs. You’re under no illusions. You know you are only doing it for the short-term sugar rush and you’ll have to work a little harder to get it out of your system. It’s astounding the number of businesses Simon Sinek sees that view an opportunity as the one that’s going to set them on a path to glory, only to have it blow up or slowly deflate over time. They see chocolate cake and can’t resist.’

So, make sure you have a clear why. ‘With a why clearly stated in an organization, anyone within the organization can make a decision as clearly and as accurately as the founder’.

To wrap things up. Keep it simple. Be a gardener, start with why and understand that leadership is not about pushing you forward, it is not about leveraging your career; it is not about you conquering something, it is not about your win. It is for something. It is about a vision bigger than oneself. It is about sacrifice. It is about commitment. It is about action. It is about the associates, the customers, the suppliers, the entire ecosystem envisaged. It is about the future.

 Plant trees you will never see, create rituals that support a great culture, build a legacy.

Analogies and metaphors are powerful. In order to build a gardening culture, we started by planting trees, cactuses, and flowers in the office. It is amazing how the experience of cultivating a tree allows you to see the beauty of the mental model. Prepare the soil. Find the perfect location. Nurture it. Eventually, fertilize it (training). It flourishes in ways you simply can’t expect.

It stamps the truth. It is not about you. It is about them.

Wishing you a special 2020, with the reminder:

If you are in the business of doing something, do something great !!