Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

by Simon Sinek

There are many ways to motivate people to do things, but loyalty comes from the ability to inspire people. Only when the WHY is clear and when people believe what you believe can a true loyal relationship develop.

Loyalty, real emotional value, exists in the brain of the buyer, not the seller.

Trust is a feeling, not a rational experience.

Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you—not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to.

the goal is not to hire people who simply have a skill set you need, the goal is to hire people who believe what you believe.

When employees belong, they will guarantee your success. And they won’t be working hard and looking for innovative solutions for you, they will be doing it for themselves.

However, pulling together a team of like-minded people and giving them a cause to pursue ensures a greater sense of teamwork and camaraderie.

Companies with a clear sense of WHY tend to ignore their competition, whereas those with a fuzzy sense of WHY are obsessed with what others are doing.

Great organizations become great because the people inside the organization feel protected. The strong sense of culture creates a sense of belonging and acts like a net. People come to work knowing that their bosses, colleagues and the organization as a whole will look out for them.

Great leadership is not about flexing and intimidation; great leaders, as General Robinson proves, lead with WHY. They embody a sense of purpose that inspires those around them.

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; an undying belief in a purpose or cause bigger than themselves.

Charisma has nothing to do with energy; it comes from a clarity of WHY. It comes from absolute conviction in an ideal bigger than oneself. Energy, in contrast, comes from a good night’s sleep or lots of caffeine. Energy can excite. But only charisma can inspire. Charisma commands loyalty. Energy does not. Energy can always be injected into an organization to motivate people to do things. Bonuses, promotions, other carrots and even a few sticks can get people to work harder, for sure, but the gains are, like all manipulations, short-term. Over time, such tactics cost more money and increase stress for employee and employer alike, and eventually will become the main reason people show up for work every day. That’s not loyalty. That’s the employee version of repeat business. Loyalty among employees is when they turn down more money or benefits to continue working at the same company. Loyalty to a company trumps pay and benefits. And unless you’re an astronaut, it’s not the work we do that inspires us either. It’s the cause we come to work for. We don’t want to come to work to build a wall, we want to come to work to build a cathedral.

The vision is the public statement of the founder’s intent, WHY the company exists. It is literally the vision of a future that does not yet exist. The mission statement is a description of the route, the guiding principles—HOW the company intends to create that future.

The part of the brain that controls feelings and the part that controls language are not the same.

the struggle that so many companies have to differentiate or communicate their true value to the outside world is not a business problem, it’s a biology problem.

A company that believed in the symbiotic relationship between corporation and community managed to drive a wedge between themselves and so many of the communities in which they operate.

It is not destiny or some mystical business cycle that transforms successful companies into impersonal goliaths. It’s people.

They will try to explain that their feeling of value comes from quality or features or some other easy-to-point-to element, but it doesn’t. Those are external factors and the feeling they get comes completely from inside them.

The new CEO will come aboard to run the company and will focus attention on the growth of WHAT with little attention to WHY. Worse, they may try to implement their own vision without considering the cause that originally inspired most people to show up in the first place. In these cases, the leader can work against the culture of the company instead of leading or building upon it. The result is diminished morale, mass exodus, poor performance and a slow and steady transition to a culture of mistrust and every-man-for-himself.

The WHY does not come from looking ahead at what you want to achieve and figuring out an appropriate strategy to get there. It is not born out of any market research. It does not come from extensive interviews with customers or even employees. It comes from looking in the completely opposite direction from where you are now. Finding WHY is a process of discovery, not invention.

Leadership requires two things: a vision of the world that does not yet exist and the ability to communicate it.