Influence Change at Any Level Simon Sinek (2024)

I get this question all the time. Simon, I buy into all your stuff, it’s wonderful. Thank you very much, but I’m not the CEO. How do I change the organization when I’m not in charge? There’s like four levels up above me. What am I supposed to do?

And the answer is, of course, you can’t change behaviors of somebody you have no contact with. Even for somebody you do have contact with, no number of anonymously sent books to senior executives is going to change the way they lead, although I encourage you to keep trying.

The reality is you take responsibility for the environment you can control. So if you have influence over seven people, people to the left, people to the right, even the boss above you, that’s still a human. And even if they’re difficult, let’s have empathy. Maybe they’re difficult because we don’t understand the pressure upon them. And if we just work to create this little pocket of magic, what you tend to find is when you have well-led teams, those teams outperform all the other teams.

So senior leadership either leaves you alone or they at least are curious and like “what are you doing?” Or somebody from the team will eventually get promoted out to another team and bring all the lessons that you taught them and lead that team the same way. And then you have two magic teams, and then somebody there gets promoted and you have four magic teams, and you have eight magic teams. And then the CEO moves on and retires, and before you know it, the tail wags the dog. Having a top leader who understands this stuff just means it’s more efficient, but it doesn’t mean it’s the only way.

We have to remember, power always belongs to the people. That’s why dictators fear people and have fake elections because they want to give the appearance of popular support, because that’s where power is derived. But dictators fear the people, which is why you can’t get close to a dictator’s house. You have to stay three miles away, and the army’s given orders to shoot to kill, right? The people always have the power, always.

And so what you do is you create these magical ripples inside an organization, and you don’t even need to convert everybody. It’s the law of diffusion. You only need about 15 to 18% of the company to fully embrace the ideas, and that’s it, the tipping point. So don’t worry about the CEO, don’t worry about the company, just worry about what you can control.

Credit: Transcript edited for clarity by Claude.