Simon Sinek

I came across Simon Sinek and some of his talks are really interesting.

I was watching some of his ideas on performance.

Here he was illustrating that you can set a goal (the circled dot in the top right), and one team’s performance may be all over the place but has a general upwards trajectory. They may have many moments of poor morale, high staff turnover, yet they reach the target and are most likely rewarded by many companies.

The second team is the fairly straight and consistent line. They don’t reach the goal and aren’t rewarded. However, give them a few more weeks and they will get there. They get there with high morale and with structure. His point is that it’s the team’s momentum that is important to spot. 

He prefers this second team but most companies will reward the first team and that bad culture will thrive.

Here, he was saying how you can categorise people in terms of Performance and Trust. We often have metrics for performance but not trust, which leads to companies rewarding toxicity.

You don’t necessarily want someone who performs high, but you don’t trust (top left circle); they may perform but “do you trust them with your money and your wife?”. No.

Obviously “low performance and low trust” is really bad, and high trust and low performance isn’t that great either. 

“High trust and high performance” is really rare, but if you come across them, then keep hold of them at all cost. The people you also need to make sure you keep are the ones he has circled on the right: “mid performance, high trust”; they are the loyal and effective employees. If you ask someone “your team is failing, who do you turn to for help?” then they will point these employees out.