In the summer of 2026 I sent my leadership team a link to a fifty-minute conversation between Simon Sinek and the late Bob Chapman, and asked them to watch it.
That is a real ask. Fifty minutes is a meeting. Sending it to a leadership team as their chief executive isn’t a recommendation, whatever I called it — it’s a signal, and everyone reading it knew that. So I tried to be direct about why, because the worst version of that email is the one where people spend the fifty minutes trying to work out what you actually wanted.
What I wanted was to say out loud what the standard was.
The line that got me
Chapman spent fifty years running a manufacturing company on a premise that sounds soft until you look at what it did to his numbers: that the people who work for you are, in his words, somebody’s precious child placed in my care.
I have read a great deal of leadership writing. Most of it is a framework with a diagram. That sentence is not a framework. It is a test you can fail in a specific meeting on a specific Tuesday, which is what makes it useful.
Run an operation that other people’s daily lives depend on and you develop a vocabulary for people that is entirely about capacity. Headcount. Resource. Coverage. FTE. None of those words are wrong and all of them are load-bearing in a budget conversation. But you can spend a decade fluent in that vocabulary and slowly stop being able to see the person underneath it — and the tell is that you never notice it happening.
Why it isn’t soft
I want to be careful here, because “care about your people” is the single most cost-free thing an executive can say, and I’ve watched it said by people who had just done the opposite.
Chapman’s actual argument is not that caring is nice. It’s that it outperforms, over decades, measurably, and that the organizations treating it as a trade-off against results are making an error rather than a hard choice. That’s a claim about mechanism, not sentiment.
I believe it for a narrower reason, from my own experience. In a high-compliance operation, the failures that hurt you most are the ones nobody reported. The near-miss that got quietly cleaned up. The number that looked wrong to somebody at the fourth level who decided it wasn’t worth the conversation. The vendor problem that everyone downstream knew about for two months.
You cannot buy that information. You cannot mandate it. It arrives only when the person closest to the work believes that raising it will be treated as help rather than as exposure — and that belief is built or destroyed in a hundred small interactions, most of which the executive never sees and none of which appear in a policy.
So when I say the standard is team first, I’m not being generous. I’m protecting the only early-warning system an organization actually has.
What I was asking for
Three things, and I said them plainly.
Team first. See the people in your care as people to protect, develop, and stand behind — not as resources to manage. That’s the standard I hold myself to and the one I want every leader holding.
Service to others. Everything in a public-service operation is in service of someone else. The person getting to an appointment they can’t miss. The person getting to work. The community that counts on it. And we serve them well only when we genuinely care for each other first. The skill that makes that real is listening — really listening, to understand rather than to reply, which is much harder and much rarer than anyone admits.
It’s how we get where we want to go. Not instead of results. The way to them.
The part I meant most
I closed that email with a sentence I have used for years, because it’s true and because it does something specific: none of us do this perfectly, myself included. We’re all imperfect humans doing our best to serve the people who count on us.
That isn’t modesty. A standard announced by someone who exempts themselves from it is not a standard, it’s a policy, and people can tell the difference instantly. If I’m going to ask a leadership team to be measured by how they treat people under pressure, I have to be first in line to be measured that way — including on the days I get it wrong, which happened.
The honest coda: I don’t know how many of them watched it. I never asked, and I decided not to, because turning it into a compliance item would have made it exactly the thing I was arguing against.
What I do know is that naming a standard out loud costs you something. It gives people a specific thing to hold you to. That’s the whole reason to do it.
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