In the video “Leadership vs. Authority,” while responding to the question “What role does one’s title play in the ability to lead?” Simon Sinek says that leadership and authority are not the same things. Title affords you authority, it affords you rank but that doesn't make you a leader. There are many people who sit at high levels of organizations who are not leaders, we do as they tell us because they have authority over us but we don't trust them and wouldn't follow them anywhere. Similarly, there are many people at low levels of organizations that have no formal rank and no formal authority but they’ve made the choice to look after the person to the left and to the right of them, and we would trust them and follow them anywhere. So, rank affords you the opportunity to lead at scale, it affords you the opportunity to take care of more people, implement systems, etc. You can also influence culture with rank but that doesn't make you a leader, you still have to study the tenets of leadership and when they align, it's magical. When you have rank and you've been studying leadership, then you can actually affect the culture in a more robust way. One of the primary responsibilities of any leader is to make more leaders and you can do that at scale if you have authority.
While responding to the question “Why is the initiative critical for the momentum of a movement?” he says that leaders move on, they retire, they quit, they leave, therefore, it would be a very weak movement if it was driven only by the force of personality of one or a few people who will inevitably move on. So, the more the people feel like the movement belongs to them, the more initiative they take to keep it alive when the leader leaves. A movement has to belong to the people, civil rights didn't belong to Martin Luther King, he did a very good job of articulating the vision better than most but it wasn't his, it was ours, it belonged to those who believed in the same vision. The more vision is shared, the more just causes are shared, the more likely it is to survive and thrive well beyond any individual.
While responding to the question “What if an individual contributor doesn’t feel like a leader?” he says that everyone has the choice to be the leader they wish they had. Leadership is a capacity like being a parent is a capacity, everyone can do it, not everyone should do it, not everyone wants to do it but everybody can do it. If somebody likes coming to work and just getting their job done and going home at the end of the day, there is no wrong in that but anyone who chooses to be a leader, which has nothing to do with rank, which simply means that they will invest time and energy to learn the skills to look after the people around them and even the people above them to express empathy and concern and care, this require an infinite mindset and therefore having an infinite mindset is really really important.
