Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization

Change the language in the tribe, and you have changed the tribe itself.

Without the leaders building the tribe, a culture of mediocrity will prevail. Without an inspired tribe, leaders are impotent.

[Don Beck] said, after hearing about the three stages of epiphany, "There's a word in the Bantu languages that [Archbishop Desmond] Tutu has used to help bring the entire country of South Africa together: ubuntu, meaning 'Today I share with you because tomorrow you share with me.'" The word can also be translated "I am because we are.

It is literally true, Burke’s groundbreaking arguments suggests, that if people change their words (or, more accurately, their words and their words’ relationships to one another), they change their perception of reality. As they change their reality their behavior changes automatically. Instead of people using their words, they are used by their words, and this fact is unrecognized.

The first clean kill awakens the whole herd.

I asked my staff why they weren’t doing anything differently, and then it became clear: because I wasn’t doing anything differently. I was still the lone ranger.

Agreement is shared intellectual understanding. Tribes are clusters of people, and people are complex and nonrational at times. If a tribe is united only by agreement, as soon as times change, agreement has to be reestablished.

The single most important takeaway from Stage Four is that Tribal Leaders follow the core values of the tribe no matter what the cost.

We see Stage Two mostly when people believe they cannot act creatively, where jobs are so mechanized that they feel like part of a machine.

Know the values, current projects, and aspirations of each person in your tribe.   Use Reid Hoffman’s “theory of small gifts” to build your relationship with people in your tribe as preparation for triading.   Form a triad by introducing two people to each other on the basis of current projects and shared values.

We see the world and our words in one impression, as if we're looking at a forest through a green filter. We can't see what's really green and what's not. If we were to walk around with the filter in our eye long enough, we'd forget it was there, and life would just be green.

Tribal Leaders focus their efforts on building the tribe—or, more precisely, upgrading the tribal culture. If they are successful, the tribe recognizes them as the leaders, giving them top effort, cultlike loyalty, and a track record of success. Divisions and companies run by Tribal Leaders set the standard of performance in their industries, from productivity and profitability to employee retention.

People at Stage Three rely on themselves. The issue that they need to address, especially later in the stage, is that their effectiveness is capped by their time, which is a limited resource. The more the person can accept help from others, the more he will see that help from others is not only helpful but necessary to his becoming a fully developed leader. Once he begins to form strategies that rely on others, and in which others rely on him, he will have taken a big step into Stage Four.

over the long term, culture and strategic performance correlate, with the higher factor falling to the level of the lower. Thus, a company with a great culture and low strategic performance will, over time, find that its culture erodes: good people leave, and a “my life sucks” language begins to dominate

we hypothesized that there are four common cultures: (1) a negative tone with an individual focus, (2) a negative tone with a group focus, (3) a positive tone with an individual focus, and (4) a positive tone with a group focus. For each one, we expected to find a consistent “web of words” that became the basis of a culture, and a reality.

We developed a belief, based on our research of three hundred thousand people, that a person’s strengths are at the very base of it all. We believe any individual can be extremely valuable or even has a shot at being a world leader if they will pull it off using their own strengths instead of trying to become a Jack Welch or a Ted Turner,” Clifton argues. The core value we heard in his statement is “potential,” and everything the organization has done is based on unlocking it—in individuals, clients, and even the entire world.

Once values and a noble cause are set, tribal strategy involves three conversations. The first is “what we want,” or outcomes. The second is “what we have,” or assets. The third is “what we will do,” or behaviors. Many strategies go sideways by having two or even all three conversations at the same time—or skipping one of them completely. It’s imperative that the Tribal Leader keep these three discussions separate. Explorati’s original outcome was “we will have created a playable proof-of-concept demonstration that uses Improvisational Computing by July 2001.

Stage Four, people assume trust; they don’t earn it. At Stage Three, trust is earned. When lost, it has to be re-earned. At Stage Four, we observed a different phenomenon: people granted trust from the beginning. In fact, when we tried to set up meetings with people at Stage Three, many rebuffed us because they didn’t know who we were. By contrast, many of the remarkable people interviewed for this book—those at Stages Four and Five—assumed we were who we said we were and granted us an interview because they said the project sounded important. The principle is this: where trust is an issue, there is no trust. Stage Four assumes trust. Stage Three says trust must be earned.

best descriptions of Tribal Leaders we’ve ever heard: using words to get the best out of people, to change everything.

The process of an oil change is for the group to talk through three questions: (1) what is working well, (2) what is not working well, and (3) what the team can do to make the things that are not working well, work. Tribes

This Tribal Leader makes it clear that violating rules has consequences and that he will enforce them—and we’ve seen him follow the adage on his wall with such unwavering conviction and resolution that it has shocked people around him. Sample has done the same, as have hundreds of other Tribal Leaders we’ve met. Glen Esnard, a Tribal Leader whom we’ll meet in Chapter 8, told us, “You have to publicly execute people who disobey the rules, otherwise everyone thinks you don’t mean what you say, and then there’s no leadership, only bulls---.” What Machiavelli refers to as atrocities, Sample calls “decisions you have to make for the good of the institution.” Glen,

is the part of the epiphany that is most remarkable to us: its work is automatic. Tobias said, “It was so obvious I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it before. The more the group succeeds, the more I succeed.” As transformational expert Werner Erhard told us, “Let it use you; don’t try to use it.

The people who use the stage-specific leverage points to upgrade the tribal culture emerge as Tribal Leaders.

Alignment, to us, means bringing pieces into the same line - the same direction. The metaphor is that a magnet will make pieces of iron point toward it. Agreement is shared intellectual understanding. Tribes are clusters of people, and people are complex and nonrational at times. If a tribe is united only by agreement, as soon as times change, agreement has to be reestablished. If people learn new ideas or see a problem from a new perspective, they no longer agree, so tribes based on agreement often discourage learning, questioning, and independent thought. Tribes based on alignment want to maximize each person's contribution, provided that they stay pointed in the same direction like magnetized iron filings.