There are five stages of tribal leadership, and each can be identified by the words people use to communicate. This book teaches us to focus on language and behavior to transform disjointed, selfish individuals into a cohesive, selfless team.
Stage One: On the Verge of a Meltdown
When people at this stage cluster together, their behavior expresses despairing hostility.
Leveraging Points:
If the person is willing to move forward, encourage him to go where the action is. This means having lunch with coworkers, attending social functions, and going to meetings.
Further, encourage him to notice the ways in which life itself works.
Encourage him to cut ties with people who share the “life sucks” language.
Success Indicators
A shift in attitude away from despairing hostility to more passive apathy.
cutting social ties with other people who are in Stage One.
Stage Two: Disconnected and Disengaged
Stage Two has an ineffective relationship with values that come across as cynicism, sarcasm, or resignation.
They accept obstacles as the way they are and the way it always will be. They give up, and they band together in a sort of support group for the oppressed.
They spend a lot of time making fun of bad managers – “idiot bosses”
Stage Two wants to avoid accountability at all costs and will invent reasons to remain disconnected and disengaged.
Triads and Stage Four Networking
Empower others to resolve conflict by reminding them of their shared values.
Stable triads resolve incidents and free the time of Tribal Leaders to focus on strategy.
Stage Four organizations actively pull in resources, approaches, consultants, ideas, or anything else that will build the tribe.
The next time you go to Starbucks, take two friends, not one.
Stage Four: Establishing Tribal Leadership
Rules for Brainstorming:
- Stay focused
- One conversation at a time
- Be visual
- Go for quantity
- Defer judgment
- Encourage wild ideas
Establishing the culture:
Get a group of like-minded people together and ask how to create or expand a business.
Look for a group of people within a Stage Three organization who want to play a Stage Four game.
Ignore organizational boundaries and use tribal antennae to find people who want to create a Stage Four tribe, allowing them to guide the development of the group.
Stage Two
25 percent of workplace tribes display Stage 2 as their dominant culture.
“My life stinks” is the adopted attitude.
People are passively antagonistic; there is no passion; laughter is quiet, sarcastic, and resigned. They expect failure.
There is little to no innovation and almost no sense of urgency, and people almost never hold one another accountable for anything.
Stage Three
This stage is the dominant culture seen in most workplaces (49%).
“I’m great, and you’re not,” is their slogan.
Doctors, professors, attorneys, and salespeople are prone to operate at this level.
Knowledge is power, and so people hoard information.
They complain about not having enough competent support.
common in companies where success is measured on an individual basis.
Stage Five
“Life is great” is the T-shirt slogan for this level.
Less than 2% of workforces operate at this level.
Their language revolves around infinite potential and how the group is going to make history – not to beat a competitor, but because doing so will make a global impact.
This stage is pure leadership, vision, and inspiration. Innovative breakthroughs happen at this level.
Corporate Tribes
Tribal leaders focus their efforts on building the tribe—or, more precisely, upgrading the tribal culture.
Tribal leadership works when the leader upgrades the tribe and the tribe embraces the leader. Tribes and leaders create each other.
A tribe is any group of people between 20 and 150 who know each other well enough that, if they saw each other walking down the street, they would stop and say “hello.”
They are likely people in your cell phone contact list and in your email address book.
A small company is a tribe.
A large company is a tribe of tribes.
5 Components of Tribal Strategy
- Values
- Noble cause
- Outcomes
- Assets
- Behaviors
Outcomes Vs. Goals
A goal is off in the future. It implies failure in the present. “when we achieve the goal, we will have stopped failing” is how many people relate to the goal-setting process.
In contrast, an outcome is a present state of success that becomes an even bigger victory over time. An outcome says, “This is what it looks like at this point in the process.”
Outcomes must be measurable, with a deadline.
The Tribe: Five Stages
Without the leaders building the tribe, a culture of mediocrity will prevail. Without an inspired tribe, leaders are impotent.
You can predict the performance of the tribe by counting the number of people who speak the language of each stage, and noticing who is in positions of leadership.
Stage One
Very few professionals operate in Stage One—less than 2 percent.
If Stage One were a t-shirt, it would read “life stinks.”
People in this stage are despairingly hostile, and they band together to get ahead in a violent and unfair world.
Stage Two: Leverage Points
Encourage the team member to make a friend. To establish dyadic (two-person) relationships.
Encourage the team member to establish relationships with people who are at late Stage Three—people who are eager to mentor others into becoming mini-versions of themselves.
In one-on-one sessions, show the team member how the work that they do makes an impact. Show them areas where they are competent and where their strengths are.
Stage Three: The Wild, Wild West
Stage Three is the zone of personal accomplishment.
It’s also an area where people tend to feel let down by others.
There’s a perception that people are where they are because they worked for it, and others aren’t there because they gave up.
People in the middle of stage three have an intense focus on time management since they believe that they can rely only on themselves.
When people at Stage Three get together, they try to outperform each other.
The Tribal Leadership Navigation System
About 75% of workplace tribes operate at Stage Three or below. The goal of this book is to upgrade your tribe to Stage Four.
You determine what stage your tribe is at by listening to how most people talk and noticing how most people structure their work relationships.
Each cultural stage has its own way of speaking, types of behaviors, and structures of relationships.
Tribal Leaders do two things:
- Listen for what cultures exist in their tribes
- Upgrade those tribes using specific leverage points
Stage Four
There’s a big gap between Stage Three and Stage Four culture.
Stage Four is characterized by “we’re great, and they’re not” and represents 22% of the workforce.
People feel free to be fully themselves. Everyone seems happy, inspired, and genuine.
The bigger the foe, the more powerful the tribe at Stage Four.
Stage Three: Leverage Points
Encourage projects that are too big to be done alone.
Point out that the next level of success is going to require a different style than going at it alone.
When they complain that they (1) don’t have time and (2) other people aren’t as good, show them that they’ve crafted their work life so that no one can really contribute.
Coach them that real power comes not from knowledge but from networks and that there is more leverage in wisdom than in information.
Encourage them to manage using transparency.
The Tribal Leader Epiphany
Nothing that matters is personal.
Stage Three has no legacy.
To win at Stage Three is to win small.
I now see I have been a manipulator, not a leader.
I’m tired; isn’t there some other game to play?
I see myself through others’ eyes, and I don’t like what I see.
Quarterly Oil Change
A chance for tribal members to revisit what’s happened, understand events from all sides, resolve issues, and remove any process, system, or habit that’s inconsistent with its values and noble cause.
Ask the Big Four Questions together as a team.
Anything not consistent with the core values and noble cause must be reworked or pruned.
