The Infinite Game

by Simon Sinek

“How do I create an environment in which my people can work to their natural best?”

It’s not the people doing the job, it’s the people who lead the people doing the job who can make the greater difference.

Leaders will work to create these environments when we train them how to prioritize their people over the results.

There is absolutely zero cost for a manager to take time to walk the halls and ask their people how they are doing . . . and actually care about the answers.

Resources are tangible and easily measured. When we talk about resources, we’re usually talking about money.

Will, in contrast, is intangible and harder to measure. When we talk about will, we’re talking about the feelings people have when they come to work. Will encompasses morale, motivation, inspiration, commitment, desire to engage, desire to offer discretionary effort and so on.

Most of us have sat in a meeting and listened to a leader present their priorities . . . and it often looks something like this: 1. Growth. 2. Our customers. 3. Our people. Though that leader will insist that they do care about their people (“our people” is one of their priorities), the order in which they appear on the list matters. In this case, there are at least two things that are considered more important than the people, and one of them is resources. How a leader lists their priorities reveals their bias. And their bias will influence the choices they make.

The finite-minded leader tends to show a bias for the score.

Infinite-minded leaders, in contrast, work hard to look beyond the financial pressures of the current day and put people before profit as often as possible.

They understand that the will of their people is the thing that drives discretionary effort, as well as problem solving, imagination and teamwork—all things essential for surviving and thriving in the future.

Especially in retail, which suffers from such high turnover rates, the common logic is, “Why invest in people who aren’t gonna stick around?” This is a one-dimensional and finite view of the way business works. Focusing on the money they can save by not investing in their people, too many finite-minded leaders overlook the additional costs they actually incur when they don’t. Hiring new people to fill the empty slots costs money. Losing experienced staff and waiting for people to get trained and adjust to a new culture all affect productivity. Add in the low morale in high-turnover jobs, and it makes one curious whether the money saved was actually worth it.

Plus, customers tend to enjoy better service when employees feel looked after, which likely translates into higher average sales.

Where finite-minded organizations view people as a cost to be managed, infinite-minded organizations prefer to see employees as human beings whose value cannot be calculated as if they were a piece of machinery. Investing in human beings goes beyond paying them well and offering them a great place to work. It also means treating them like human beings. Understanding that they, like all people, have ambitions and fears, ideas and opinions and ultimately want to feel like they matter. It may feel like a risk to many a finite-minded leader. To shell out all that extra money with the “hope” that it works out. Lower wages and fewer benefits are simply easier to calculate. However, it may be worth the risk. When companies make their people feel like they matter, the people come together in a way that money simply cannot buy.

Very often, finite-minded leaders believe the source of will is externally motivated—pay packages, bonuses, perks or internal competition. If only that’s all it took to inspire a human being. Money can buy a lot of things. Indeed, we can motivate people with money; we can pay them to work hard. But money can’t buy true will. The difference between an organization where people are extrinsically rewarded to give their all and one where people are intrinsically motivated to do so is the difference between an organization filled with mercenaries versus one filled with zealots. Mercenaries work hard only so long as we keep paying top dollar for their effort. There is little loyalty to the company or the team. There is no real sense of belonging or feelings that anyone is contributing to something larger than themselves. Mercenaries are not likely to sacrifice out of love and devotion. In contrast, zealots love being a part of the organization. Though they may get rich doing what they are doing, they aren’t doing it to get rich. They’re doing it because they believe in the Just Cause.

How we treat people is how they treat us.

There is a difference between a group of people who work together and a group of people who trust each other. In a group of people who simply work together, relationships are mostly transactional, based on a mutual desire to get things done. This doesn’t preclude us from liking the people we work with or even enjoying our jobs. But those things do not add up to a Trusting Team. Trust is a feeling. Just as it is impossible for a leader to demand that we be happy or inspired, a leader cannot order us to trust them or each other. For the feeling of trust to develop, we have to feel safe expressing ourselves first. We have to feel safe being vulnerable. That’s right, vulnerable. Just reading the word makes some people squirm in their seats.

When we work on a Trusting Team we feel safe to express vulnerability. We feel safe to raise our hands and admit we made a mistake, be honest about shortfalls in performance, take responsibility for our behavior and ask for help. Asking for help is an example of an act that reveals vulnerability. However, when on a Trusting Team, we do so with the confidence that our boss or our colleagues will be there to support us. “Trust is the stacking and layering of small moments and reciprocal vulnerability over time,” says Brené Brown, research professor at the University of Houston in her book Dare to Lead. “Trust and vulnerability grow together, and to betray one is to destroy both.”

Our ability to trust is not based on our industry. This is human being stuff. Sometimes all we need to do is translate the concepts to fit the cultures in which we work.

In business, the resistance tends to come from a different place. Leaders of companies tell me that business is supposed to be professional, not personal. That their job is to drive performance, not to make their people feel good. But the fact is, there is no avoiding the existence of feelings.

There is no way we can turn off our feelings simply because we are at work.

To deny the connection between feelings and performance is a finite-minded way of looking at leadership.

Trusting Teams, it turns out, are the healthiest and highest-performing kind of teams.

Performance is about technical competence. How good someone is at their job. Do they have grit? Can they remain cool under pressure? Trust is about character. Their humility and sense of personal accountability. How much they have the backs of their teammates when not in combat. And whether they are a positive influence on other team members. The way one SEAL team member put it, “I may trust you with my life but do I trust you with my money or my wife?” In other words, just because I trust your technical skills doesn’t mean I think you are trustworthy as a person. You might be able to keep me safe in battle, but I don’t trust you enough to be vulnerable with you personally. It’s the difference between physical safety and psychological safety.

that the person in the top left of the graph—the high performer of low trust—is a toxic team member. These team members exhibit traits of narcissism, are quick to blame others, put themselves first, “talk shit about others” and can have a negative influence on their teammates, especially new or junior members of the team.

If the SEALs, who are some of the highest-performing teams in the world, prioritize trust before performance, then why do we still think performance matters first in business?

Time is always the great revealer of truth.

it is actually incredibly easy to identify the high performers of low trust on any team. Simply go to the people on the team and ask them who the asshole is. They will likely all point to the same person.

If someone’s performance is struggling or if they are acting in a way that is negatively impacting team dynamics, the primary question a leader needs to ask is, “Are they coachable?” Our goal, as leaders, is to ensure that our people have the skills—technical skills, human skills or leadership skills—so that they are equipped to work to their natural best and be a valuable asset to the team. This means we have to work with the low-trust players to help them learn the human skills to become more trusted and trusting, and work with the low performers to help them learn the technical skills to improve their performance. Only when a team member proves uncoachable—is resistant to feedback and takes no responsibility for how they show up at work—should we seriously consider removing them from the team.

In an organization, it is the leader’s responsibility to take the first risk, to build a Circle of Safety. But then it is up to the employee to take a chance and step into the Circle of Safety. A leader cannot force anyone into the circle.

The process of building trust takes risk. We start by taking small risks, and if we feel safe, we take bigger risks. Sometimes there are missteps. Then we try again. Until, eventually, we feel we can be completely ourselves. Trust must be continuously and actively cultivated.

Human beings are hardwired to protect ourselves. We avoid danger and seek out places in which we feel safe. The best place to be is among others around whom we feel safe and who we know will help protect us. The most anxiety-inducing place to be is alone—where we feel we have to protect ourselves from the people on our own team. Real or perceived, when there is danger, we act from a place of fear rather than confidence.

it’s not enough for leaders to simply create an environment that is safe for telling the truth. We must model the behavior we want to see, actively incentivize the kinds of behaviors that build trust and give people responsible freedom and the support they need to flourish in their jobs. It is the combination of what we value and how we act that sets the culture of the company.

A culture in which pressure to meet numbers was replaced with a drive to take care of one another and serve the community better.

Infinite games, remember, require infinite strategies. Because crime is an infinite game, the approach Chief Cauley’s officers are taking is much better suited to that game than an attack-and-conquer mindset. The goal is not to win in the overall scheme of things; the objective is to keep your will and resources strong while working to frustrate the will and exhaust the resources of the other players. Police can never “beat” crime. Instead, the police can make it more difficult for the criminals to be criminals.

If an officer feels inspired to go to work every day, feels trusted and trusting when they are there and has a safe and healthy place to express their feelings, the odds are pretty high that members of the public who interact with that officer will benefit too. Just as customers will never love a company until the employees love the company first, the community will never trust the police until the police trust each other and their leaders first.

If leaders, in any profession, place an excess of stress on people to make the numbers, and offer lopsided incentive structures, we risk creating an environment in which near-term performance and resources are prioritized while long-term performance, trust, psychological safety and the will of the people decline. It’s true in policing and it’s true in business. If someone who works in customer service is highly stressed at work, it increases the likelihood that they will provide a poor customer service experience. How they feel affects how they do their job. No news there. Any work environment in which people feel like they need to lie, hide and fake about their anxieties, mistakes or gaps in training for fear of getting in trouble, humiliated or losing their job undermines the very things that allow people to build trust. In the policing profession the impact can be much more serious than poor customer service.

In weak cultures, people find safety in the rules. This is why we get bureaucrats. They believe a strict adherence to the rules provides them with job security. And in the process, they do damage to the trust inside and outside the organization. In strong cultures, people find safety in relationships. Strong relationships are the foundation of high-performing teams. And all high-performing teams start with trust. In the Infinite Game, however, we need more than strong, trusting, high-performing teams today. We need a system that will ensure that that trust and that performance can endure over time.

In other words, the Marine Corps focuses on assessing the inputs, the behaviors, rather than the outcomes. And for good reason. They know that good leaders sometimes suffer mission failure and bad leaders sometimes enjoy mission success. The ability to succeed is not what makes someone a leader. Exhibiting the qualities of leadership is what makes someone an effective leader. Qualities like honesty, integrity, courage, resiliency, perseverance, judgment and decisiveness, as the Marines have learned after years of trial and error, are more likely to engender the kind of trust and cooperation that, over the course of time, increase the likelihood that a team will succeed more often than it fails. A bias for will before resources, trust before performance, increases the probability a team will perform at higher levels over time.

One of the primary jobs of any leader is to make new leaders.

leaders are not responsible for the results, leaders are responsible for the people who are responsible for the results. And the best way to drive performance in an organization is to create an environment in which information can flow freely, mistakes can be highlighted and help can be offered and received. In short, an environment in which people feel safe among their own. This is the responsibility of a leader.

Ethical fading is a condition in a culture that allows people to act in unethical ways in order to advance their own interests, often at the expense of others, while falsely believing that they have not compromised their own moral principles. Ethical fading often starts with small, seemingly innocuous transgressions that, when left unchecked, continue to grow and compound.

Ethical fading is not an event. It doesn’t just suddenly arrive like a switch was flipped. It’s more like an infection that festers over time.

“I wasn’t going to be apologetic for operating in the system that existed.” (As an aside, accountability is when we take responsibility for our own actions, not when we blame our actions on the system.)

Of course, if Mylan had a culture that placed ethics above earnings and believed its primary responsibility was to its Just Cause—rather than itself or its shareholders—then the company could have used their might in the market to become a champion for change much sooner and with a lot less fuss. Acting unethically, getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar, refusing to accept responsibility for your behavior and then pointing to systemic abuses that made you do those things does not make you Joan of Arc.

According to social scientists who study the phenomenon of ethical fading, those who commit such violations of trust aren’t evil, but they do suffer from self-deception.

We humans have all sorts of clever ways to rationalize our behavior and deceive ourselves into thinking that the ethically questionable decisions we make are fair and justified, even though a reasonable person would view our actions as quite the opposite.

One of the ways we are able to deceive ourselves comes from the words we use. The use of euphemisms, to be exact. Euphemisms allow us to disassociate ourselves from the impact of decisions or actions we might otherwise find distasteful or hard to live with. Politicians were aware that Americans find torture to be inhumane and inconsistent with our values. So “enhanced interrogation” became the way for them to protect our homeland after September 11 without feeling bad about it.

The words we choose can help us distance ourselves from any sense of responsibility. They can, however, help us act more ethically too. Imagine if we actually started calling things what they are within our organizations. If we did, perhaps we would take the time to find more creative, and indeed more ethical, ways of achieving our goals. And in so doing, actually strengthen our cultures in the process.

Remember, ethical fading is about self-delusion. Anyone, regardless of their personal moral compass, can succumb to it.

When problems arise, performance lags, mistakes are made or unethical decisions are uncovered, Lazy Leadership chooses to put their efforts into building processes to fix the problems rather than building support for their people. After all, process is objective and reliable. It’s easier to trust a process than to trust people. Or so we think.