TRIBAL LEADERSHIP
By Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright
Collins, 297 pages, $31.95
Every organization is made up of tribes, groups of 20 to 150 people who are bound together by familiarity and shared work. Tribes are the little-acknowledged, basic building block of any large human effort.
"In companies, tribes decide whether the new leader is going to flourish or get taken out. They determine how much work gets done, and of what quality," consultants Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright advise in Tribal Leadership.
The term "tribe" may seem out of place in a discussion of modern organizations. But we know the importance of culture. And the consultants in this book offer us a chance to look at culture in a concrete way, through a five-stage tribal process that has emerged from their study of 24,000 people in two dozen organizations. They also mesh culture and strategy: If you want your strategy to succeed, it has to take into account the nature of the tribe you are leading, and how to influence it to attain your goals.
To determine the tribal stage of an organization, they say you have to listen carefully to the language people use.
Stage 1: Life sucks
If individuals at this stage had a T-shirt, it would read, "Life sucks." They are despairingly hostile, and band together to get ahead in a violent and unfair world. Human society started at this stage, and now we see it commonly in prisons and street gangs. Fortunately, only 2 per cent of North American professionals operate at this stage at any given point.
Stage 2: My life sucks
Here language centres on how "my life sucks." People are passively antagonistic, their laughter sarcastic and resigned. If you have presented at a meeting with passion only to be greeted with looks of passivity, you have probably hit a stage two culture. In 25 per cent of workplace tribes, the dominant culture is stage two, and most companies have pockets of stage two tribes.
Stage 3: I'm OK, you're not
The operating credo is : "I'm great, and you're not." This is the operating philosophy in 49 per cent of workplace tribes, as competitive lone warriors brought up in schools that gave them gold stars for having the right answers maintain those individualistic ways. No amount of traditional team building exercises will turn this collection of individuals into a team, the authors warn, something we have seen at times with the National Basketball Association superstars who form the U.S. entries in Olympic competition.
Stage 4: We're great
The tribal pride at this level leads people to exclaim (and believe): "We're great!" It occurs in 22 per cent of workplace tribal cultures, with people excited being with each other, and feeling a sense of pride at what they have achieved as a group. The tribe at this stage - be it a football team, or engineers at Apple Inc. with an eye on Microsoft Corp. - always has an adversary. "The bigger the foe, the more powerful the tribe," the authors say.
Stage 5: Life is beautiful
The authors thought only four stages existed and were about to wrap up their research in the early 1990s when they delineated an additional stage at Thousand Oaks, Calif., biotechnology giant Amgen Inc., where employees had the collective pride of stage four but weren't out to beat a competitor, unless it was cancer or arthritis. Individuals at this stage are intent on making a global impact. Their T-shirt would read: "Life is great." But it's difficult to stay at this stage; tribes recede to stage four for periods and then return to this phase at other times, with less than 2 per cent of workplace tribes in it at any one time.
To manage your organization, the authors explain, you must figure out how to nudge the critical mass of the tribe into higher and higher stages. "The process involves moving many people forward, individually, by facilitating them to use a different language, and to shift their behaviour accordingly. As that happens, the tribe will produce a new, self-sustaining culture." When a tribe gets to stage four, it won't tolerate egotists who talk at the stage three level or below.
This is a new prism for looking at organizations, bringing together common concepts in a different way. The book is an instructional manual with lots of tips, and sections on purpose and strategy, which the authors interweave with their tribal culture approach. It's an appealing brew, if complicated in a first reading, and of course making it work in your tribe will be a lot harder than reading the book.
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