Leaders Eat Last: How Great Leaders Build Trust

Most teams do not fail because they lack talent. They fail because they do not feel safe enough to tell the truth, take smart risks, or trust their leaders when things get hard. We dig into Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last and the real point behind that phrase: leadership is service, sacrifice, and putting your people first, even when nobody is watching.

Buzz shares a unforgettable story from his early days at a nuclear power plant, where a foreman named Red runs into danger to carry an injured worker out. It is a masterclass in leadership trust and a reminder that the strongest “culture statement” is what we do under pressure. From there, we connect the lesson to Buzz’s experience in the US Air Force and why the leaders people follow are not always the loudest or the smartest, but the ones who stay calm, take responsibility, and protect their team.

We also break down the “circle of safety” and why workplace culture, employee engagement, and team performance are deeply tied to human biology. When people feel valued and protected, collaboration and loyalty rise. When they feel threatened or disposable, stress and office politics take over. We talk practical ways to build psychological safety through small, consistent actions: keeping your word, sharing credit, admitting mistakes, listening well, and offering simple encouragement that lands.

If you want to lead with integrity and build a high-trust team, hit play, then take one idea and use it this week. Subscribe for more leadership coaching, share this with a leader who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

Welcome And Podcast Format

TJ 0:00

Welcome to the Leadership Buzz with Lloyd Buzz Buzzell Buzz is an international coaching federation, ACC credentialed coach, disc practitioner, and retired Air Force officer with 37 years of leadership experience. This podcast is for leaders who want to align behavior with values and grow in self-awareness. Each episode features one book, one idea, one story, and three coaching questions to reflect on your leadership. Work hard. Tell the truth. Here's Buzz. Let's roll.

Trust And Service Over Status

Buzz 0:40

Welcome back to the Leadership Buzz. I'm Buzz Buzzell. Today we're talking about leadership trust and what it means to put your people first. In a world where many leaders focus on results, titles, getting ahead, and self-promotion, the best leaders remember that leadership is really about service. Our book today has stayed relevant for many years. The message is simple great leaders create an environment where few people feel safe, supported, and valued. TJ, tell us about the book we're using today.

TJ 1:11

Welcome back to the Leadership Buzz. Today we are talking about a book that has influenced leadership conversations for years, Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. The idea is simple but powerful. The best leaders put the needs of their people ahead of their own. They create trust, safety, and a culture where people feel valued, protected, and supported. When leaders do that, teams perform better, stay connected, and are more willing to go the extra mile. We will talk about what that looks like in real life, why trust matters so much, and how servant leadership shows up in the everyday decisions leaders make. Over to you, Buzz.

Red’s Rescue And Real Sacrifice

The Circle Of Safety At Work

Biology Stress And Team Culture

Trust Built In Small Moments

Long Term Leadership And Encouragement

Buzz 1:54

When Simon Sinek talks about leaders eating last, he's not really just talking about food. He's talking about sacrifice. It's about how leaders who put the needs of their people ahead of their own. That title comes from a story he had from the Marine Corps, where the most junior Marines eat first, the officers eat last. That is not become officers are less important, it's because the leader's job is to take care of the people. That idea connects with me because I saw something like that a long time before I ever read the book and before I went in the U.S. Air Force. When I was twenty one years old, I was working at a nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. During my time I was working on a set on the second shift, and there was an accident where a man was hurt in a dangerous dangerous area. It was at the bottom of the containment building. The containment building was a large building that at the bottom of it that had a lot of iron pipes, low overheads, and places where you had to crawl around through crawl spaces and you could get hurt pretty easily. Well, everyone on the site on the project heard about that, and many people rushed over to the containment building to see how that person would come out of there. Now the containment building had a large section in the front of it that was cut out so they could move big pieces of material in and out of the building, and eventually that would all get sealed up and secured before the fuel or anything went active on the site. As we got over there, it was evening, and the steam was blown across the site. I mean, it was right out of a John Wayne movie. As we rushed up to the site to see what was happening, Red emerged from that hole with the steam crossing him with a slight breeze, and he came out carrying that guy over his shoulder. It was a pretty incredible situation. It reminded me of the movie where Maverick lands on the flight deck in Top Gun. I mean, there was cheering, loud noise, he brought the guy out to the EMTs and they took him away, and he was all set. Well, I guarantee you that Red probably didn't have to buy a beer for a long time, or if ever, on that construction site. Now Red was the type of person that was the foreman, superintendent of all the other foremans on the site. His name was Red. He had red hair, but a lot of it was his disposition and how action-oriented and how he would get things done. He was the type of guy that would go kiss your baby, get no get you kicked in the butt to get back on work, or loan you fifty bucks if you needed it, and may all be in the same situation. Well, I had never seen leadership look like that. It wasn't because we thought he had rescued somebody and we were happy, and we definitely were, or that we would be excited that we'd know that if we were in trouble, he would come get us. We knew that already too. But the really thing that resonated with everybody was that we saw that Red put his safety behind ours. He put our needs and he would put our needs every day in front of ours. And that's the first time I'd ever seen that and see what a leader really looked like. And that's what Cynic talks about in his book from his story from the Marines, where they eat last. They're always putting their needs behind the team's needs. Let them be taken care of first. He says they create the best leaders when he calls this circle of safety. That means where people are feeling protected, they feel like they belong, they can speak up, they feel like they can make a mistake without being punished. They feel like somebody has their back, just like on that construction project with Red. When people feel safe, they stop spending energy protecting themselves and worrying about office politics. They don't worry about who's getting credit, they stop holding mistakes. Instead, they're starting to focus on the mission. They start helping each other. They can become more willing to take risk and more willing to tell the truth, and that's when the team really gets stronger. And that's when the organizations perform at their highest levels. I saw this in the military when I was in the U.S. Air Force. People know very quickly whether a leader is there for themselves or there for for their team. The leaders people trusted more were not always the loudest people, and they weren't always the smartest. They were the people who stayed calm when things got hard and then took responsibility when something went wrong. That credit when something and then they shared credit when something went right. They protected their people from unnecessary pressure and really listened. They really spent time with people. They knew their people mattered more than just numbers on a slide. And I was just reading something, when people consider them numbers, they are just numbers. In the military, people do incredibly hard things for leaders that they trusted. And it wasn't because of the rank, it's because they knew their leaders cared about them and were putting their needs in front of the leaders' needs. And that's what Cynic is getting at. It's not about being in charge, it's about taking care of the people in your charge. That's a big difference. A lot of people want the title, they want to get promoted, they want their corner office, and they want the status. But the leaders come with responsibility. It comes with sacrifice. It means staying late sometimes, having hard conversations, and taking the blame when things go wrong. And that comes a lot in the U.S. Air Force and the military where you get the credit when things go right as a leader, but you also stand up and put yourself first when things go wrong. That means putting your team ahead of your own ego. One of the things I really liked about this book is that Senate talks about how our biology affects leadership. When people feel safe, trusted, and valued, good things happen. People become more collaborative, more loyal, they solve problems faster and really stay engaged. When they're threatened, blamed, ignored, or disposable, stress takes over and people get defensive. That's where the office politics come in, they stop trusting, they start taking risks, protecting themselves, and eventually the culture starts to break down. That is why leaders matter so much here. A leader can create a culture where people feel safe, supported, and valued. I would ask you, are you doing that in your organization right now? You can create a culture where people feel anxious, overlooked, and exhausted, or you can feel the difference. Most people have worked for both kinds of leaders. I am sure you have too. Cynic also makes a point that people should become before profit. That does not mean results do not matter, of course they matter. In the US Air Force, you're not going to stay around very long if you're not getting results. But if you sacrifice people to get the numbers, eventually you're going to lose both the numbers and you're going to lose the results and you're going to lose the people. You can hit the numbers and still lose the team. You can get promoted and still damage that culture around you, and we've all seen that. The bus leaders understand that people are not expendable, and if you take care of the people, the people will take care of the mission. Listening matters along with trust. Telling the truth matters. Checking on people matters, and while they get the credit before you do, because ultimately you're going to get credit because your team is doing well. I think that this is why this book still resonates with so many people. People want to feel that safe and they want to feel valued and know their leader cares about them. When they do, they work harder, they trust more, and they're becoming willing to go after big goals together. That's what Red showed me all those years ago when I was 21 years old. And this is what I saw in the best leaders I served under in the military. And that is what Simon Sinek is trying to teach in Leaders E Last. Leadership is service, sacrifice, putting your people first. One thing the book does really well is explain why so many organizations struggle. I mean, a lot of leaders think the answer to more pressure is, hey, let's have more meetings, more oversight, accountability, metrics. We talked about this in the previous podcast. But often the problem is not that people don't care. The problem is that people don't feel safe and they don't feel heard. If they don't feel valued and trusted, people are going to stop giving their best. They do enough to get by, but they avoid risk. They become risk avoidance, and that they stay in the middle of the road and they just really stop speaking honestly, and eventually they just get disconnected. And that's why that culture is matters so much. It's not a slogan on the wall. It's not posters about values. It's really how they come to work. It's about how people feel that when they come to work. And it's whether people feel safe enough to tell the truth and trust their leadership, and whether people believe somebody has their back. And that's why trust is so important, and that's what you build as a leader, and that's what you foster also as an employee. It's in those small moments when there's follow through, let leaders keep their word. They help check on people when things are going tough and when things are going good. And when leaders admit those mistakes and leaders are honest and they come back and they spend more time with people, then that trust becomes something that everybody is looking for. When it's inconsistent, people stop trusting leaders. They stop trusting leaders when they only show up when something is wrong. One of the biggest ideas in leaders eat last is that leaders create the environment people work in every day. So if leaders create fear, blame, politics, and self-protection, people spend all their energy looking over their shoulder. But when leaders create trust, consistency, honesty, and support, people become more willing to work together. That is really what the circle of safety is all about that he describes in his book. You can people feel protected on the inside so they can focus on those outside challenges. The focus on the mission and serving customers if that's what's going on, and serving on solving problems. They can focus on taking advantage of those opportunities, and the leaders shape that environment that people work in every day. The other thing I noticed about this book is how many leaders look and focus on short-term results. The numbers for this quarter, the quick win, they want the recognition. But Cynic argues that great leaders think long-term, that's about building people, trust, and culture, and that takes time. You cannot build trust overnight, and you can't build loyalty and a great team overnight. That takes consistency, patience is showing up again and again for your people, and that's why real servant leadership is not a weakness. It's not soft. It takes strength to put the other people first, it takes maturity to stay calm, discipline to listen. And there's some humility involved to admit when you're wrong. That courage to protect your people when it would be easier to protect yourself. And that's why the best leaders are remembered. People don't remember every speech. They don't remember every meeting. But they will remember how a leader made them feel. They remember whether they felt safe, valued, and they remember whether they felt like someone believed in them. And that's why I think this book continues to resonate. I will say, I think in my US Air Force career, what I noticed was that a lot of times I don't really reflect back to what the event that happened. I reflect on how that leader treated me. And so I tried to use that myself when I looked at my folks. I know some of my best leaders did things that were just extraordinary to make sure I was helped or served in a very unextraordinary way. And those simple things like leaving a note to of encouragement for me or just taking me aside and telling me I was doing a good job meant so much more than a medal or any type of raise or promotion. I mean, that goes a long way when just a kind word or some type of encouragement from a leader does such a great job of making sure that you're valued and you feel respected. Many times a short note of encouragement or just a short text to somebody of making sure that they know that you've seen what they're doing means so much to one of your teammates. And that could be a peer or that could be even your boss. I would encourage you to take a look and see how you can implement something like that today.

TJ 14:28

Let's get to this week's three coaching questions for our listeners.

Buzz 14:32

For this week's three coaching questions, first off, describe a time when your team felt safe, supported, and fully focused on the mission. What were you doing as the leader that helped create that environment? Next, where might your own need for control, recognition, or certainty be affecting the way your team experiences you as a leader? And also, if your team no longer had to spend energy protecting themselves, what could become possible for them, for you, and for the mission? How would that show up if that were to be true?

TJ 15:07

Leaders Eat Last reminds us that leadership is not about status, control, or putting yourself first. It is about creating an environment where people feel safe, valued, and supported. When leaders consistently put the mission first and the needs of the team ahead of their own, trust grows. People may not remember every meeting, every metric, or every decision, but they will remember how their leader made them feel. They will remember whether they felt protected, encouraged, and respected. The leaders people want to follow are the ones who serve first. Back to you, Buzz.

Buzz 15:46

Thanks for listening to the Leadership Buzz. If you enjoyed today's episode, share it with someone else who cares about leadership. You can follow me on LinkedIn or visit workhardtellthetruth.com for more leadership content and updates. And if this episode made you stop and think, take one idea from it and put it into practice this week. Until next time, keep leaving, keep serving, work hard, and tell the truth.