Leaders Eat Last

When you are with Marines gathering to eat, you will notice that the most junior are served first and the most senior are served last.

Marine leaders are expected to eat last because the true price of leadership is the willingness to place the needs of others above your own.

Great leaders truly care about those they are privileged to lead and understand that the true cost of the leadership privilege comes at the expense of self-interest.

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

When leaders inspire those they lead, people dream of a better future, invest time and effort in learning more, do more for their organizations and along the way become leaders themselves.

to earn the trust of people, the leaders of an organization must first treat them like people.

“When you have people who trust you, they’re going to do a better job for you to earn or keep that trust.”

he set out to create an environment in which people felt they could express themselves honestly and be recognized and celebrated for their progress.

To treat people like family and not as mere employees.

We need to build more organizations that prioritize the care of human beings. As leaders, it is our sole responsibility to protect our people and, in turn, our people will protect each other and advance the organization together. As employees or members of the group, we need the courage to take care of each other when our leaders don’t. And in doing so, we become the leaders we wish we had.

the danger inside is controllable and it should be the goal of leadership to set a culture free of danger from each other. And the way to do that is by giving people a sense of belonging. By offering them a strong culture based on a clear set of human values and beliefs. By giving them the power to make decisions. By offering trust and empathy. By creating a Circle of Safety.

Without a Circle of Safety, people are forced to spend too much time and energy protecting themselves from each other.

Every member of the group plays a role in maintaining the Circle of Safety and it is the leader’s role to ensure that they do. This is the primary role of leadership, to look out for those inside their Circle.

It is easy to know when we are in the Circle of Safety because we can feel it. We feel valued by our colleagues and we feel cared for by our superiors. We become absolutely confident that the leaders of the organization and all those with whom we work are there for us and will do what they can to help us succeed.

it creates an environment for the free exchange of information and effective communication.

it creates an environment for the free exchange of information and effective communication. This is fundamental to driving innovation, preventing problems from escalating and making organizations better equipped to defend themselves from the outside dangers and to seize the opportunities.

We cannot tell people to trust us. We cannot instruct people to come up with big ideas. And we certainly can’t demand that people cooperate. These are always results—the results of feeling safe and trusted among the people with whom we work.

Stress and anxiety at work have less to do with the work we do and more to do with weak management and leadership.

When we know that there are people at work who care about how we feel, our stress levels decrease.

This is why we are willing to change jobs in the first place; we feel no loyalty to a company whose leaders offer us no sense of belonging or reason to stay beyond money and benefits.