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Sixth, you are hungry for tips, tools, and techniques that will make you more efficient. What surprised us, and may surprise you now that you see it, is the amount of effort you spend protecting your “I’m great” turf.
If you want a shock, go to the business section of your local bookstore and mentally categorize books at Stage Two, Three, or Four. You’ll see what we did: “owning” Stage Three is a multi-million-dollar business in publishing alone.
Seventh, unlike people at Stages One and Two, you talk about values. However, your focus is “my values,” “what I’ve come to see,” and “the principles I hold dear.” In essence, your view of values is that they give you an edge in ethics and time management.
Telling people you think they’re at Stage Three can be career-threatening.
Make the person aware that she’s using management, rather than leadership. People at Stage Three approach leadership as though it were a set of tasks they could check off their to-do list (e.g., “set the vision,” “get alignment,” and “listen with intention”). The moment leadership becomes cookie-cutter, it isn’t leadership at all—it’s management. By making the person aware that he’s behaving in a Stage Three fashion toward leadership, you might help him see that he isn’t a leader at all.
Having interviewed thousands of people who have made it into Stage Four, the zone of Tribal Leadership, we discovered that every person had an awakening.
Note that throughout, our focus is language, not psychology or spirituality. We didn’t map why the people in our study changed their concepts and experienced an epiphany or had a shift in their awareness. We didn’t measure anything about their spiritual beliefs or practices. Ken Wilber, a world expert on developmental stages in society, author of two dozen books, and founder of the Integral Institute, told us that these two parts of a human being—her psychology/worldview/spirituality and her conversations—tend to advance in stages
we hadn’t done a single thing that would affect how individual supervisors treated people, not a damn thing. We would go in, win a court victory, and leave.
“I learned to name the thing I was doing that was holding me back,” he continued. “Once I could name it, I could do something about it. It was ‘working for’ versus ‘working with.’ ”
It’s worth noting that both Stages Three and Four require an adversary.
At Three, the enemy is other individuals. At Four, it’s another group, or a company, or even an industry. Only at Stage Five does the need for an enemy go away, as we’ll see in Chapter 12.
it’s likely (in fact, almost certain) that he was saying the Stage Four words: “vision,” “partnership,” and “collaboration” but that his sentences were focused on “I,” “me,” and “my.”
people start the move into the epiphany with an awareness of a different way to operate but without any idea how to make it real. Since we were measuring their language, not their psychological state, we noticed that people’s discussion of Stage Four came before their actions.
The challenge for the coach is to nudge the person to see that the system of Stage Three develops no true followers; hence, no legacy. It’s not that the person isn’t capable of leaving a legacy—she is—it’s that the stage in which she is operating isn’t designed to do that.
The first part of the epiphany is that the person isn’t making the impact he thought he was. The second part is that the “I,” “me,” “my” system isn’t capable of fixing the problem.
the real problem with Stage Three: it cannot be fixed; it can only be abandoned.
As the person sees into her blind spots she realizes that the ego hit of accomplishment isn’t the same as success itself. Her attention shifts to what’s really important to her, and almost always, the goal is tribal.
Note that people don’t lose ambition, drive, or work ethic by moving to Stage Four. After the epiphany, Tobias had more personal power, not less.
Here’s one quote from The Prince: “Well committed atrocities are committed once so one may establish oneself. Poorly committed atrocities are done at first sparingly, then more and more. Therefore, one taking a state must commit all the atrocities at the beginning.”
Good to Great:Get the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off.
We’ve met hundreds of managers who put this passage from The Prince into service for their own promotion—the Stage Three system. They fired the people who threatened their power, destroyed Stage Four cultures that preached a different way of operating, and purged their departments of anyone who didn’t seem loyal to them. Sample admits that Machiavelli’s techniques, in the hands of someone out for personal gain, can be disastrous.
In school, when someone goes up a grade, say from third to fourth, the new grade isn’t fun. There isn’t as much art or painting. The old teacher is gone, as is our rapport with her. To make it worse, we see her at recess surrounded by children who aren’t us, and it just feels unfair. A few months later, going back to the old grade seems unimaginably simple. We can barely believe we were challenged by the topics of third grade, now that we’re on to tougher math and harder reading. The games seem juvenile and silly. When we’re ready to leave the fourth grade, we have the same feelings as we did
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In our research, after a person has had the epiphany that takes him from Stage Three to Stage Four, he behaves differently than before. Our data show that people tend to take one of three paths. David Kelley took the first: he gets together a group of like-minded friends and asks how they might make money. The relationships come before the business model; the tribe before the profits.
The second path is that the newly minted Stage Four person looks for people in a large organization (usually a corporation, nonprofit, or government) who are eager to play by a different set of rules.
The third path is that the person forges out on her own, developing what we call tribal antennae—an intuitive ability to find people who can contribute to success on a larger scale
TECHNICAL NOTE: Stage Four tribes pay almost no attention to organizational boundaries.
Note that for public companies, Wall Street’s focus on short-term results can take a Stage Four tribe off purpose.
Tribal Leaders of publicly traded companies often act as a buffer against the short-term thinking of analysts and stock speculators. They do demand success, but they keep the focus on values, structure of relationships, and strategy—
The three giveaways are a tendency toward meetings of at least three team members, giving credit and keeping blame, and support from the entire team (encouraged by the leader) during training.
In Stage Four groups, when two members of the group meet, they’re excited about being with another member of the tribe. People are fully themselves. No corporate cult, and no copycat leaders running around.
COACHING TIP: What if my CEO is at Stage Three?
do?” We recommend creating a pocket of excellence in whatever small ways are allowed by the boss, and then let the results speak for themselves.
Note that although tribes always form, only Stage Four tribes have a sense of their own identity. People at Stage Two feel disconnected, and at Three, they report constantly battling it out with others in an ego war. At Stage Four, however, everything changes. People identify with the group and its values. In Stage Four organizations, it’s common for employees not to list their job titles on cards.
We have to see two things about how Rueve made the leap from “I’m great” to starting a Stage Four tribe from scratch. First, she built the company around a set of values: vitality, quality, and passion.
Second, Rueve has developed a common characteristic of Tribal Leaders who form a tribe from scratch: they have “tribal antennae”—the ability to identify contributions of people not yet in the tribe.
Reid Hoffman, the CEO of LinkedIn, whom we’ll meet in Chapter 10, went even further: “I tell Internet entrepreneurs that if you are not embarrassed by your first product release, then you have launched too late.”
By releasing a product and then creating dialogue with partners, a Stage Four tribe learns what it should change to become more successful. In essence, it creates partnerships with its clients, just as the corporate itself runs on partnership.
A key point for companies that want to attain Stage Four is to go for values now.
Almost without exception, we found that wildly successful organizations talked about values when it appeared they could least afford to do so.
In his view, the most important part of his schedule as CEO was his monthly evening meeting with all new Amgen employees. He would spend a few minutes on the history of the company, and then, in his words, “get right to values.” He would talk through each one, saying what the company felt it meant and how it applied. “I would say to them, if these aren’t your values, you should leave,” Binder said. “It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, but it does mean you’re the wrong person for Amgen.”
two most important aspects of owning Stage Four: identifying and leveraging core values, and aligning on a noble cause.
By definition, core values and a noble cause can never be “checked off,”
“When we won in 1980, it wasn’t a miracle; we won because of a strong commitment and work ethic, not just for one game, two games, three games, but for six months, and for when we started to play as young kids.
We’ll offer two ways to detect values, both of which we’ve learned from people in our studies. The first—longest but most effective—is to tell a story about how you learned one of your core values.
The second way to get at someone’s values is to ask a simple question and follow it up with three to five open-ended questions. A good question is “What are you proud of?”
When people talk about “a principle without which life wouldn’t be worth living” (which is our definition of a core value), they become excited and vibrant.
Most companies hire for skills, not for values, and may thus find themselves without Amgen’s values homogeneity. The key in this situation is to dig deeper and find values that unite people.
We offer tools for discovering your values, and those of your tribe, on our Web site, www.triballeadership.net.
COACHING TIP: Keep looking for new ways to express the values. When a tribe commits to values, it makes those principles superior to the edicts of executives and managers. One of the pitfalls we caution company leaders to avoid is to identify values and then make decisions based on expediency, as if the values didn’t exist.
It is at this moment—when a leader begins talking about everyone’s values, as opposed to individuals discussing “my values”—that tribal magic happens.
we’ve also seen people operating at Stage Three attempt to make a group gel—and fail. Often, their approach is to say, “I think we all value . . .” or “I believe it’s time for us to come together.” Such attempts, based in “I,” “me,” and “my” language won’t work for values, unless the “I” really means “we.”
