This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Leaders Eat Last" by Simon Sinek. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Do you feel like your organization has a supportive work environment? What can you, as a leader, do to cultivate a supportive work culture in your organization?
In a supportive work environment, employees feel that you see them as people, rather than mere assets to increase profits. In his book Leaders Eat Last, management theorist Simon Sinek suggests three strategies to strengthen your supportive environment and encourage trust and collaboration.
Let’s explore Sinek’s strategies for cultivating a supportive environment in the workplace.
Strategy #1: Prioritize Long-Term Goals
Oxytocin helps you create a supportive work environment by forging empathetic connections between you and your subordinates. Sinek believes that you can encourage oxytocin production in both your employees and yourself by prioritizing long-term goals. For example, instead of focusing on your company’s profits for this year, plan how you’ll impact the market for the next five. This puts your decisions in the context of causing lasting positive change, rather than immediate, temporary success.
Prioritizing Short-Term Goals Stifles Oxytocin
According to Sinek, a major reason you should prioritize long-term goals is the drawbacks of the alternative: prioritizing short-term goals. Fulfilling short-term goals encourages your body to produce dopamine, rather than oxytocin. Dopamine is a neurochemical that motivates and rewards you for completing tasks by providing happy feelings, much like oxytocin. However, while oxytocin motivates you to form relationships—a long-term goal, since relationships take time to form—dopamine motivates you to complete short-term tasks—for example, writing a report—and is immediately produced in large amounts.
(Shortform note: Experts say that part of dopamine’s motivational nature is improved memory: When you successfully complete a short-term goal, you first feel happy, then the dopamine helps your brain store the memory of that happiness. This memory motivates you to try again and reminds you how to succeed the next time you attempt that task. Dopamine-enhanced memory is a good thing, in that it helps you learn and succeed more easily in the future, but it can also have a negative influence, as it can form bad habits by motivating you to repeat unhealthy behaviors.)
Many people neglect their oxytocin production because it takes time to compound and make them happy. Instead, they focus on producing as much instant gratification through dopamine as possible. For leaders at work, this focus on instant gratification manifests as fixating on the company’s daily operations while neglecting how those daily decisions influence your subordinates or the company’s long-term goals, Sinek implies. The more fixated on producing dopamine you are, the less oxytocin you produce, the less empathetic you are, and the weaker your company’s supportive environment becomes.
(Shortform note: Another problematic element of seeking instant gratification is growing a tolerance to dopamine: If you rely only on dopamine to make you feel happy, you’ll be tempted to continually trigger your brain to produce more. However, the more you trigger dopamine production, the less effective it becomes and the more you have to escalate your dopamine-seeking behavior—for example, starting to use drugs—to feel happy. Fortunately, you may be able to reset your dopamine tolerance through fasting: If you don’t trigger dopamine production for a while, your brain will be much more sensitive to it when you do experience it next.)
Strategy #2: Unite Against Common Hardship
Another strategy you can use to strengthen supportive environments is uniting against common hardship, Sinek says. Facing hardship as a group increases oxytocin production: Your brain rewards you for collaborating with your subordinates and coworkers in a threatening situation, and these higher oxytocin levels strengthen the supportive environment.
(Shortform note: Sinek says that oxytocin production increases when you collaborate with others in a threatening environment. Is this any different from collaborating in a non-threatening situation? Experts say yes. When you experience hardship, your brain is more engaged: You must monitor the threat, think of solutions to the problem, and work with others to enact those solutions. This state of heightened engagement means you remember the connections you forged during the threatening experience better than you would those from a non-threatening experience. Since your brain rewards you for forming connections, these strong memories trigger higher levels of oxytocin.)
Most companies unite against common hardship by nurturing a higher purpose. Sinek explains that a higher purpose is similar to a long-term goal in that it takes time and company-wide cooperation to complete. However, higher purposes are more abstract than long-term goals: They usually provide a sense of meaning beyond making profits or dominating a field, and they don’t have concrete timelines for completion. When you and your subordinates are devoted to fulfilling this kind of purpose, the possibility that you’ll fail to do so becomes enough of a threat to encourage collaboration and strengthen the supportive environment.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Simon Sinek's "Leaders Eat Last" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full Leaders Eat Last summary :
- Why a leader must prioritize her subordinates’ needs above her own
- How empathy and support can be strong managerial tools
- Why you must see your customers, suppliers, and employees as people
