Are You Looking in the Mirror or Out the Window?

Many of you have probably heard me rave about a recently published book, Tribal Leadership, by Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright.  In a rigorous eight-year study of about 24,000 people in more than two dozen companies, the authors found that the success of companies depends on the effectiveness of its team's tribal culture.  While many companies had adequate teams, only about 25% broke through to be outstanding--like the Apple team that developed the iPod.

The authors found that organizational cultures evolve  through stages, and that each stage grows out of the previous.

1. The lowest stage identified by the authors is composed of people who are alienated and express their behavior through despairing hostility.  Fortunately, only two percent of tribes are stage one, and they are likely not to last--due to embezzlement, theft, cheating, etc.
2. Stage two tribes, 25% of  all workplace tribes, are not really teams.  They are what I call the Dilbert crowd, passively antagonistic people who believe "my life sucks" and are neither interested nor prepared to do anything about it.  
3. Half of all workplace cultures are stage three--with good reason because we train stage three cultures from kindergarten through graduate school.  Stage three is comprised of individuals competing to be the best.  Winning is personal, knowledge is power, and the winner gets promoted.  Trust is not a premium.  Synergy is not in the vocabulary.  
4. Stage four is where it gets interesting. Stage four, 22% of all tribes, is arrived at when individuals have an epiphany:  "Together we can be greater than our individual strengths...  and my value is not diminished through collaborating openly."  This team develops tribal pride.  These tribes still need an adversary--another tribe, another organization, etc. to compete against, but they commit to shared core values and hold one another accountable.  Thus, they perform well above the individualists of stage three.
5. Stage five comprises 2 percent of the workplace culture.  Stage five tribes no longer concern themselves with competition with others, but with serving a noble cause and having  impact.  The authors describe this tribe's mood as innocent wonderment.  "This stage is pure leadership, vision, and inspiration.  Life is great."  These are the teams that change the world.

Tribes one through three (and to a some extent, tribe level four), look in the mirror more than out the window--where members are more concerned with how they are surviving, achieving, or performing as compared to others.  And many nonprofits--whose missions speak to a tribe at level five--are often entangled in level three and four habits.  We see evidence of this in many ways--hero leaders, lack of integration among departments (or within departments), vision statements that speak about being the best rather than impacting the lives of those the organization serves, and competition between nonprofits serving a similar cause.

It takes courage, insight, discipline (and an epiphany) to develop a level five tribe--a team capable of collaborating across organizational boundaries for a greater good.  But the payoffs are huge.   Tribes that achieve level five are made up of people who aspire to a noble cause and share core values.  The authors recommend that leaders who want to develop level five tribes need start with defining what the tribe stands for (core values) and lives for (the cause).  Then they need to provide leadership to help the tribe determine:  What they want (outcomes).  What they have (assets).  What they will do (behaviors).

As the authors of Tribal Leadership note, the level of the tribe can be diagnosed from the language tribe members use.  To achieve level five, tribes need to replace their mirror with a window.  They need to relinquish their focus on shortcomings, self concern, preservation of the status quo, and posturing in exchange for a focus on the possibilities, on securing a greater good for the people they serve. When achieved, level five tribes have extraordinary power because of their ability to connect to others who care deeply.  As the authors describe, level five tribes "form ever growing networks with anyone whose values resonate with their own."

May we all discover our noble cause.

Jim