Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t

Simon Sinek paints a clear dichotomy between managers and leaders. Simply holding the title of “manager” does not qualify someone as a “leader,” the latter being a far greater responsibility than any title can imply. Even for people in the highest echelons of corporate America—such as former General Electric CEO Jack Welch—leadership is more than having the authority to make large-scale decisions. A manager may have authority within the hierarchy of a company or organization, but this power does not automatically translate to leadership. Sinek argues that a true leader knows when to delegate and divest authority: “The more energy is transferred from the top of an organization to those who are actually doing the job, those who know more about what’s going on on a daily basis, the more powerful the leader” (184). A strong leader is the foundation of a strong organization, cultivating cultures where trust and empathy are the dominant forces, as evidenced in Bob Chapman, Charlie Kim, and James Sinegal. In these cases, effective leadership is not a utopian myth, but a lived reality.

For both Bob Chapman and Charlie Kim, their approach to leadership stemmed from a belief that employer-employee relationships should operate in ways akin to parents and their children.