3Apr2019
Transform Your Culture with Simon Sinek
by: Nordic Business Forum
“While inspiration gets people to take the first step and follow in the calm, trust gets people to climb the hill and brave the storm.”
According to Simon Sinek, a renowned leadership expert and New York Times bestselling author, trust is one of the most significant catalysts for working together as a team towards a higher purpose.
Trust in organizations, however, is not easy to achieve, if power distance between junior and senior roles becomes too high. Hence, leaders sometimes struggle with creating a safe environment for their team, where feedback is can be given without any obstacles caused by power distance.
Simon Sinek introduces a way of changing your company’s culture from junior-senior thinking into safe and innovative by creating circles of safety. Watch Simon’s tips on using a version of the 360-degree feedback process that includes all team members ignoring any power distance between different roles.
Key points:
- As a leader, “give constructive critical advice in a way that is not hurtful to people but in a way that they feel cared for.” This will help you create a culture, where also leaders themselves get honest feedback.
- With Simon’s 360-model, the only thing you’re allowed to say is “thank you”, when you get feedback: “You can’t defend yourself, you can’t offer excuses. This offers a chance for the most junior person in the room to tell the most senior person in the room how they affect their work positively or negatively.”
- “Create the environment of feedback and you will get the feedback that you want and need.”
The bottom line? Power dynamics can stand in the way of trust and open feedback. In order to get and give honest feedback, you need to create a safe and trusting culture by disregarding any implications of junior vs. senior roles in the feedback process.
Tip: Learn more about cultural change with Simon’s tools on transforming organizational culture.
Who is Simon Sinek?
Simon Sinek, a trained ethnographer, author, motivational speaker, and organizational consultant, also described as “a visionary thinker with a rare intellect,” teaches leaders and organizations how to inspire people. With a bold goal to help build a world in which the vast majority of people go home every day feeling fulfilled by their work, Sinek is leading a movement to inspire people to do the things that inspire them.
He is the author of multiple bestselling books, including the global bestseller, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t and Together is Better: A Little Book of Inspiration, and his newest book, Find Your Why: A Practical Guide to Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team.
Simon may be best known for popularizing the concept of Why in his first Ted Talk in 2009. It rose to become the third most watched talk of all time on TED.com, with over 35 million views and subtitled in 45 languages. His interview on Millennials in the Workplace broke the internet in 2016. It garnered over 80 million views in a week and is now up to more than 200 million views, inspiring conversations on the subject around the world.
Simon will be one of the keynote speakers at both Nordic Business Forum Sweden and Nordic Business Forum Norway in May 2019.
Want to see Simon speak live? We still have tickets available to NBFNorway on May 9th. Get yours today!
