Simon Sinek: How to Have Difficult Conversations

there is a need for uh the teaching of human skills because we haven't been doing it. Um for too long we've been primarily ranking people and promoting people based on their performance. So if your numbers are good, you'll get a promotion, but that doesn't mean necessarily that you're a good leader. Being good at your job doesn't mean that you're good at leading other people at that same job. And so leaders are recognizing remember uh the way we used to our used to live our lives if you go back you know 30 or 40 years is we didn't get everything from one place or one person. We used to get our sense of community from uh the bowling the bowling league for example. Um we had barbecues with our neighbors. Um we would go to church on Sundays. That's where we got our our sense of purpose and belonging. Um, and we went to work and made a living from work to pay our bills. And over the course of time, church membership has gone down. The bowling leagues have gone away. We don't really hang out with our neighbors as much. We stay indoors much more. And now we're asking our work to replace all of those things. We want our community, our belonging, our purpose. We want our social lives. And now uh we want our politics to be all completely uh fulfilled at our place of work. And unfortunately, you make the comparison to personal relationships and it's exactly right. We're asking too much of one person or one organization. It's it's an impossible impossible standard, which leaves us disappointed, angry, and frankly in a in a in a in a sort of constant uh mode of searching. You know, the grass is greener somewhere else, I hope. >> So, what what are business leaders saying to you? Are they saying like, I I can't keep up with this. They want me to take a stand on politics. They want me to take care of their mental health, their emotional health, and pay their bills. What do I do? >> So, there is a lot of stress. I mean, businesses right now, there's there's they feel like there's a little bit of chaos. Add into the fact that um they don't they're even struggling to get people to come back to work. They're they're trying to figure out the right balance of what hybrid work looks like. Um and quite frankly, nobody has figured it out. Um the advice that I'm giving is we're in a position of crazy flux and uh we're going to have to just sort of wait a little bit to see where all the all the dust lands. Um still we have to practice good leadership and and do our best to make people feel seen, heard, and understood. However, that's still >> Okay. So, so how do we do that? How do we practice good leadership at if we have a company like you have a company? How do we practice good leadership if we're parents and kids, adult kids are saying, "What do we do?" How do we practice good leadership in a relationship? >> One of the things that's missing is human skills. Quite frankly, you know, we talk a lot about hard skills. We go to college to learn these hard skills so we can get a good job. Um, our companies teach us the hard skills, the skills we need to do well at work. But we talk about soft skills and I hate that term because hard and soft are opposites. And I I hate to think that those things are opposites, but really they're human skills. And we need to teach human skills both in our universities and in our in our companies. Things like active listening, things like empathy, uh how to have a difficult conversation, how to have an effective confrontation, how to give and receive feedback. And these kinds of skills, not only are they immensely valuable at work, it turns out the companies that teach those skills, uh, their employees report having better, uh, relationships with their spouses and with their kids back home. >> So, are you saying that business leaders are coming to you and saying, I want to teach these skills and they bring in somebody to teach it to them, or do they teach it to the entire company? >> Both. Uh, the answer is both. there there is a there is a need for uh the teaching of human skills because we haven't been doing it. Um for too long we've been primarily ranking people and promoting people based on their performance. So if your numbers are good, you'll get a promotion, but that doesn't mean necessarily that you're a good leader. Being good at your job doesn't mean that you're good at leading other people at that same job. And so leaders are recognizing there is a skill gap um that they have to fill. So you you talk about like an in you have the the book the infinite game the infinite mindset versus the finite mindset and that could also apply once again not just to businesses or politics but also to relationships and and parenting right so how if someone is sitting there watching this and they're struggling with adult kids they might be struggling in their relationship they're struggling at work maybe they're not the leader at work but they're wanting more from their work or they're a political leader leader. What are you what are you suggesting to people to talk about right now? How do we lead people in small in incremental steps to get to where we can be a more optimistic society and group of people? >> Well, leaders leadership starts at home. Um, and this is I think what people uh forget which is we you know we put pressure in our companies, we put pressure on our politicians, we sit back and say why aren't you doing this? And the reality is our politics and our politicians are largely a reflection of us. We're complaining that we're not getting these things from them. We're complaining that uh they're divisive, that they're stubborn, that they don't listen to each other. Well, that's us. That's us. They're a reflection of us. And the reality is you don't need rank to be a leader. I know many people who sit at very high levels of organizations who are not leaders. They have authority and we do as they tell us because they have authority over us. But we wouldn't trust them or follow them. And yet there are people with no formal position of authority that have made the choice to look after the person to the left of them and to look after the person to the right of them and we trust them and follow them anywhere. Those are the leaders. So leadership is this is quite frankly the awesome responsibility to take care of those around us. And every single one of us has the opportunity to be the leader we wish we had whether at work or at home. It's the one who takes the initiative to take care of others. >> So what does that look like if somebody says, "Yeah, I want to be what Simon just described. I want to be that person. I may not have the rank or the authority. How do I begin?" >> So again, it's like eating an elephant. You just you can start anywhere. Like I want to get into shape, you know? I have to do I have to do curls and I have to do squats and I have to do all the doesn't matter where to start. Start anywhere. And I mentioned some of the skills before. Active listening I think is the big one. And leaning into tension. So, we have tension at work and we have tension at home. And usually the way we address tension is we either ignore it. We're passive aggressive. Or we sometimes wait for it to build up and then it bubbles out and boils up and we attack someone or we start in an unhealthy way where we make someone feel pressed into a corner with some sort of accusation. And so the ability to lean into tension in a healthy way and tell someone how we're feeling in a situation and necessarily take responsibility for our part creates a scenario creates an environment in which the other person is not only more likely to listen but more likely to take responsibility for their actions as well. I'll take I'll give you a perfect example from my own life. um someone very very uh dear to me uh told me that she's been struggling to trust me over the past few months. I immediately got defensive. I immediately say, "How could you tell me this? Why didn't you tell me, you know, the week it happened? Why did why did you wait to tell me months after this is why you felt this way?" >> And she interrupted me and said, "You're getting defensive. I just need you to hear me." And I had to check myself and realize that because it's hard to hear that I'd done anything that made somebody not trust me. The reality is I had to hold space and say, "Tell me more. What else?" And just let her tell me how she felt without taking it personally. The result was profound. Not only did she feel very held and very trusted in that moment, but I learned this skill. I learned to sort of put my own feelings aside for a moment to allow another person to feel heard. And I think that is a skill that's just completely missing at work and at home. >> Yeah. So that's like to the idea like if I think about my bosses coming up in the network news business as holding space for me. It's it's just not even possible. I can't even imagine. Uh they would have told me, you know, there's the door. Walk walk through it if you don't like it here. Yeah. So are you do you think that what particularly young workers are asking of their business leaders is to hold space to actively listen to their lives and leaders are completely illquipped to like do that. That feels awkward. That feels like go talk to your spouse, go talk to your therapist. That's not my job. >> The answer is yes and no. I mean it's not I I would love for people in leadership positions to have that skill of course but really I want uh I want everybody in the company to have that skill as well so that we can turn to each other and say I'm struggling and somebody else can say to us tell me more go else how can you know and and hold that space for that person hold that hold that emotion for them um however it comes with a caution um which is there's still such a thing called emotional professionalism which Seth Goden talks about a lot which is we don't have the right to you know because we're having a bad day to sit in a meeting like this and give one-word answers when asked that is emotionally unprofessional and one of the things that I saw particularly from young people it's not exclusively young people but it does skew young which is especially during co if you if you think before COVID we would go to work then we'd go out with our friends and we'd complain about work and that's perfectly healthy right it's perfectly healthy to go and vent to people who we don't work with and then we go back to work the next day and we feel a lot better. But during co that that uh that healthy space to vent was taken away. We didn't go out with our friends after work. And so what ended up happening is we have this this tension. We need to get it out. And so we start looking for it at work. And I and uh again skews younger particularly young people would find an empathetic ear at work. Somebody who was just good at listening, a good empath. And they wouldn't just to complain about their boss, although that happened too. They would say, "I hate my relationship and I don't want to live at home anymore and what am I going to do with my life?" And these people, these empaths were taking on all of this stress. And I heard multiple stories of people who were quitting claiming burnout, but if you looked at their workload, they their workload shouldn't have burnt them out. It's because they were overwhelmed with the of taking on everybody else's stress. And >> so they were holding space for people, but these people weren't respecting their boundaries. And so yes, we want people to have that skill set, but there there is a limit by that we can there is a limit to how far we can bring all of our personal things to work to people at work. >> So where would you say kind of how would you grade our relationships kind of across the board in 2023? Are we moving professionally in the right direction? Are workplaces in a year from now going to be more filled with empathetic listeners with people more adept at human skills? Are relationships going to be um less dependent on one person and more in a village? Are parental figures going to be more are they going to get used to these terms boundaries and triggering and space? uh that because it's a new vocabulary out there in all of these areas. >> And the simple answer is yes. I mean, look, it's embarrassing that I have a career, right? Like I talk about things like trust and communication. There should be no demand for my work, but there is. And I see that as an opportunity. I see that as something hopeful. The fact that you're doing a story on this, you know, if this was 20 years ago, they they would laugh at you and say, "No, we don't need that story." The fact is people are interested in this. The fact is people are wanting to learn. Um the fact is companies are investing in this kind of education both for themselves uh for for the leaders in the company and for their their employees and and the topic of mental health is has been destigmatized which is very very very good. So yes I am I am hopeful that over the course of time we we actually will get better at these things and we will develop these skills. Do you you talked about kind of millennials and younger people in the workplace, but there are still a lot of boomers uh my age and so and and uh in the workplace. Do you see these uh many people say the generational divide is what the issue is that these generations are just completely different human species. They don't have the same language. They don't look at work at all the same way. And I noticed that a little bit myself. You know, we came up in work and it was a very different place. Different things were expected, different things from the boss. Do you see growth more in one generation? Do you see this generational divide or do you think that the generations can actually look to the other to gain uh a little bit of what the other has learned? >> Well, generational uh divide has existed for as long as there's ever been generations. Um so that's not a new idea. And you know, and it's it's fairly common that older generations want to keep things the same because it's familiar and they're good at it. And younger generations want to break everything because, you know, they're younger and they see new opportunities. And there's always been that tension regardless of the time frame we live in. Um, but I think quite frankly there's responsibility on both sides. Yes, the generational divide on how we view work is very different in this modern day. And what I preach is empathy, which is which is try to understand the point of view of the other. And that goes in both directions. Now, you know, it's it's it's expected that the leader should go first, but it does go the other way as well. So, again, going back to those those those human skills, listening and empathy um will benefit both sides.