I was doing my usual sweep of the web looking for new keynote speeches when I ended up watching a video clip on TED.com of David Logan talking about ‘Tribal Leadership’
In my corporate days I’d come across various psychometric testing tools such as Myers Briggs, Belbin and such like as well as the meta-programs in NLP, which are designed to give an insight in to how people think and operate. Listening to David, his theory added a further layer of looking at human behaviour from a group level and understanding how it manifests itself in organisational culture.
The basic premise is that we seek out people like us and form tribes based on how we see the world. In fact this is how society is formed.
David’s keynote explained that there are 5 key stages of tribes and tribe formation which help can helps understand them better.
Stage 1 Where people say “life sucks” – These are people see no hope for the world, they can see point in contribution and where they are cut off from or have cut themselves off from society. Examples here are prisoners, gangs and underground culture.
Stage 2 Where people say “My life sucks” – These are people who are unfulfilled with their own lives, the see no future for themselves, in terms of their job or career prospects – their job is a means to an end and a seen a just a cog an a system over which they have little influence. Think civil service, government agencies, public sector
Stage 3 Where people say “I’m great and you’re not” – The typical blue chip corporate culture. It’s about individuals out doing other individuals, the mantra is “We/I am better than you!.” To get ahead you have to be in competition with others, you are are pit against colleagues and measure against one another. Here politics are formed, motives are general about self preservation, it’s all about “what’s in it for me?”
Stage 4 Where people say “We’re great”. It’s where people come together for a greater purpose beyond themselves. It’s doesn’t have to be a humanitarian purpose – just a common goal that brings or unites the group. They see the value in collaboration, co-operation and sharing. This is where innovation thrives, where revolution is born, where transformation happens and revolutionaries exist.
Stage 5 Life is great – Leadership at the highest level, change the world kind of stuff. This is beyond the self, beyond the us and for good greater that the collective at much higher level.
In today’s ever competitive landscape where advances in technology and globalisation have transformed the way business is done and I believe that it is stage 4 tribes that will survive and prosper in this new economy. It is the organisations that embrace the need to move to a more collaborative approach to working and understand that harnessing the power of talent across functions, disciplines and responsibilities that will be most successful for the long term.
Stage 4 is where visionary, leading, cutting edge companies and organisations operate.
David’s team concluded that it is the ‘culture’ that drives the way the tribes behave and by culture I am talking about the ‘way in which things are done around here’.
Leadership in these businesses understand that it is them who drive culture. They know that when you take a group of people and unite them under one common goal which is greater than their own individual goals, interesting things begin to happen.
I was lucky enough to have been part of an organisation that did this really well in the UK. In 1998 a quirky bank called egg took on the giants of the credit card industry and promised to ‘revolutionise the experience of financial services for it’s customers through unleashing the power of people’
Rather than represent a ‘tick in the box’ for having a mission statement that so many other companies seem to do, the difference with egg was that this became part of it’s DNA. It wasn’t just a lofty ambition…it was the core purpose. It was the reason why people came to work. It was what drove the daily decisions made. It was what people referred to when needing direction. It was what the collective stood for.
When you have people from different ‘tribes’ and with such varying models of the world it becomes even more critical that the possibility being described was engaging enough for each stage of the tribes. Egg’s leadership team not only understood that their job was to give people that possibility to live into in a manner where they could then entrust them to deliver, but also once they moved people there to keep them there.
Few will argue that what they achieved in the UK market in such a short space of time was remarkable.
The approach to leadership at egg isn’t just reserved for big business…it’s just as and I would argue even more critical for smaller business to give their people a common purpose and possibility to live into. Think about it how much impact does one person not pulling in the same direction have in your business?
I invite you to find out what tribes exist in your business.
Start to observe people, I mean really observe people. How we see the world drives our behaviour and behaviour is simply the external evidence to what is really going on inside.
Ask ‘How do you people interact?’ ‘How do they react to change?’ ‘How do people get ahead in your company?’
Listen for how people communicate. What is their language saying? Do they speak “we” or “I”? Is “can’t” a commonly used word? How do they describe their prospects and they way they feel about their work?
