Leaders Eat Last

Key Concepts

Circle of Safety

“It is just a matter of biology and anthropology. If certain conditions are met and the people inside an organization feel safe among each other, they will work together to achieve things none of them could have ever achieved alone. The result is that their organization towers over their competitors.” (p. 17)

“By creating a Circle of Safety around the people in the organization, leadership reduces the threats people feel inside the group, which frees them up to focus more time and energy to protect the organization from the constant dangers outside and seize the big opportunities. Without a Circle of Safety, people are forced to spend too much time and energy protecting themselves from each other.” (p. 26)

Organizations often operate counter to safety

“Unfortunately, too many of the environments in which we work today do more to frustrate than to foster our natural inclinations to trust and cooperate. A new set of values and norms has been established for our businesses and our society—a system of dopamine-driven performance that rewards us for individual achievement at the expense of the balancing effects of serotonin and oxytocin that reward us for working together and building bonds of trust and loyalty.” (p. 115)

Part of the problem is abstraction

“Abstraction is no longer restricted to physical space; it also includes the abstracting nature of numbers. The bigger our companies get, the more physical distance is created between us and the people who work for us or buy our products. At such scale, we can no longer just walk into the aisles and count the cans of soup on the shelf either. Now we rely on documents that report the numbers of what we’ve sold and how much we’ve made.” (p. 126)

Quotables

“Only when the Circle of Safety surrounds everyone in the organization, and not just a few people or a department or two, are the benefits fully realized.” (p. 28)

“Known collectively as the Whitehall Studies, the studies’ findings were both astounding and profound. Researchers found that workers’ stress was not caused by a higher degree of responsibility and pressure usually associated with rank. It is not the demands of the job that cause the most stress, but the degree of control workers feel they have throughout their day.” (p. 35)

“A study by two researchers at the Graduate School of Social Work at Boston College found that a child’s sense of well-being is affected less by the long hours their parents put in at work and more by the mood their parents are in when they come home. Children are better off having a parent who works into the night in a job they love than a parent who works shorter hours but comes home unhappy.” (p. 38)

“It is said that if you wake up in the morning and the first thing you crave is a drink, you might be an alcoholic. If you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is check your phone to read e-mail or scan through your social media before you even get out of bed, you might be an addict.” (p. 53)

“This is what work-life balance means. It has nothing to do with the hours we work or the stress we suffer. It has to do with where we feel safe.” (p. 71)

“In weak organizations, without oversight, too many people will break the rules for personal gain. That’s what makes the organizations weak. In strong organizations, people will break the rules because it is the right thing to do for others.” (p. 93)

“In perhaps the greatest irony of this period, however, the parenting strategies that Boomers popularized actually left many of their children less prepared to work in the corporate environments they themselves built, ones in which Circles of Safety are the exception rather than the rule.” (p. 244)

“When a company declares that its cause is to become a global leader or to become a household name or to make the best products, those are selfish desires with no intended value to anyone beyond the company itself (and often not even everyone in the company). Those causes can’t inspire humans because those causes aren’t causes. No one wakes up in the morning inspired to champion that. In other words, none of them is a cause bigger than the company.” (p. 285)

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