Leaders Eat Last

There is a recurring factor that sets successful organisations apart from others: the leader comes last. This is much more than a slogan, it is a fact: the price of leadership is to place the team’s needs before your own. We can see an example of this in the marines, where the young people are served their meal before the older ones, not because of any written rule, that's just how they do things.

In successful organisations, leaders provide protection from the top, and people at the lower levels support each other: this behaviour creates an atmosphere in which people feel at ease and are able to give their best, even when doing so means taking risks. Going back to the marines, this might even mean endangering their lives. This dynamic is natural: if a team’s leadership protects it from internal rivalry, the individuals within that team can experience an atmosphere of cooperation and trust, and they won't waste their energy looking over their shoulder. Basically, in these types of organisations, Leaders naturally adopt the same behaviours that have enabled the human species to become dominant, taking advantage of its innate desire to cooperate. The ability to work together, to help each other and protect one another is what helped our ancestors survive: elephants survived, too, but they did not evolve in the same way as humans did.

We can also look to the Spartans (the famous warriors of ancient Greece) for another example. Losing one's shield during a battle was the worst crime a Spartan could commit: yet any warrior that lost his armour was forgiven. Anyone who lost his shield had his citizenship taken away because while the helmet and breastplate protected him, his shield also protected the soldier next to him as part of the interlinked formations they used.