I’ve referenced Simon Sinek’s wonderful book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action and his corresponding TED Talk several times here (here’s a listing of those posts). But I found his follow-up work, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, harder to get through. His message was relevant and insightful, but I often felt as if he were spending the entire book simply drumming home the same 4-5 concepts.

Thankfully, I came across this article summarizing the main points of the book as Sinek relayed them in a presentation to a team at Microsoft. His suggestions are deceptively simple—put your people first, tell them the truth, trust them to make good decisions, etc. But if it were actually that easy and obvious, why don’t more leaders do it?

If you work in any kind of leadership capacity—whether you’re a student, a parent, or a counselor—I recommend you consider his suggestions. And if they resonate with you, then give his book a try. You might find the same frustrations with it that I did, but the message is still important. And if you went into the book knowing what the takeaways are intended to be, you could spend more time thinking about how to apply the lessons, and less time wondering if you’re missing something.