Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization

by Dave Logan

the same executives often put values on the backs of employee badges and yet, in the minds of employees, don’t follow them when faced with a tough situation. The single most important takeaway from Stage Four is that Tribal Leaders follow the core values of the tribe no matter what the cost.

If core values are the fuel of a tribe, a noble cause is the direction where it’s headed. A noble cause captures the tribe’s ultimate aspiration. Said differently, core values are what we “stand in” and a noble cause is what we “shoot for.”

A noble cause is a pronouncement of a future state that a tribe will bring about through its coordinated action. It is bigger than what one person can do alone, no matter how many people are offering technical support; it requires people’s best efforts and passions. It should arouse so much excitement in a tribe that even if people fail, the noble cause was worth the effort.

The reason tribes have a noble cause is that it gives them a common vision that cuts across individual differences and makes leadership possible. It produces alignment and often the ability to work with people who seemed to be enemies.

From our research, there are two ways to set a noble cause. First, keep asking “in service of what?”

Here’s the test of whether a noble cause is doing its job: agreement aside—people will always want to wordsmith it—there’s a feeling that the tone of it is right, that it captures why they come to work instead of moving somewhere else. In short, they align on it.

The second technique to setting a noble cause is to ask what we call the Big Four Questions. As we watched Tribal Leaders do their work, we noted that they tended to ask, “What’s working well?” “What’s not working?” “What can we do to make the things that aren’t working, work?” and “Is there anything else?”

COACHING TIP: Go from time management to space management. In the Stage Three system, individuals rely only on themselves, so maximizing every minute is critical. Part of the epiphany to Tribal Leadership is seeing that the individual is incapable of winning alone, so establishing values-based relationships becomes the new focus. We refer to this as space management—managing the space between people.

The advice from our research is simple: build the noble cause into ongoing communication, and don’t resort to gimmickry.

A rogue tribe is one in which people adhere to noncore values, which are values that don’t have universal benefit. Likewise, a noble cause that benefits one group by disenfranchising another is a sign of a rogue tribe. “Integrity” is a core value only when people want it to apply to everyone—including their competitors.

A noncore value is one that applies if only you have the “right” interpretation of it, and this links values to belief. Al Quaeda says it exists for Islam—but only their interpretation of it. The Mafia has loyalty as a value, but it’s their interpretation of it—loyalty for the group and its leaders—not for everyone. The Mafia isn’t interested in the rest of us having loyalty. It’s a value on their terms, or not at all. A value that isn’t for everyone undoes itself.

In tribal terms, it starts with a concern for making sure we maintain our “we’re great” status by purging anything that isn’t in agreement (notice: not alignment) with the values and noble cause.

Spanish Inquisition example

The Spanish Inquisition has two vital lessons for Tribal Leaders. First, values must be core, and that means universal. The moment a group withholds the benefit of a value from another, it is not universal, hence not core. Second, the unity resulting from core values and a noble cause must be alignment, not agreement.

Alignment, to us, means bringing pieces into the same line—the same direction. The metaphor is that a magnet will make pieces of iron point toward it. Agreement is shared intellectual understanding.

Every Stage Four tribe we studied did regular “tribal maintenance”—airing grievances, ensuring alignment between activities and the touchstones of values and a noble cause, and deepening people’s relationships. We came to term this process an “oil change,” and we recommend that tribes schedule it at least once a quarter.

The process of an oil change is for the group to talk through three questions: (1) what is working well, (2) what is not working well, and (3) what the team can do to make the things that are not working well, work.

Sprint retrospective?

Identifying values and establishing a noble cause is a process, not an event.

one simple act of behavior stands out: her ability to “triad”—to create business relationships between two people, based on core values and mutual self-interest, and then move on.

While the triad is the basic building block of Stage Four cultures, these blocks can be stacked to the sky, resulting in large, robust, dynamic, and growing networks of tribes at Stage Four. All are vibrant, values-based, and filled with people giving their best efforts—leading and being led at the same time.

When you use triads to solve problems, remind people of shared values. Values, as we saw in Chapter 9, lead to alignment, which trumps any disagreement.

Not only do forming and nurturing triads save the Tribal Leader time, they encourage a level of followership that is unimaginable at Stage Three. A test of a true Tribal Leader is why people would come to their funeral: Do their words of praise stem from their hearts or from a desire to be politically correct?

Many Stage Three organizations reject innovations they didn’t originate—a situation often called the “not invented here syndrome.” Stage Four organizations, like Griffin, will actively pull in resources, approaches, consultants, ideas, or anything else that will build the tribe.

“What most people don’t understand is that if you manage your career, what you are doing is actually managing a set of relationships,” Hoffman told us. “People need an infrastructure for that within their heads.”

COACHING TIP: Next time you go to Starbucks, take two friends, not one. Once people see the value in a group of three, they often make three the minimum number for a meeting. Our clients have told us that it’s changed their entire corporate tribes.

It’s time for consulting, as an industry, to transition from “consultant-as-expert” to “consultant-as-partner.”

information. If a person doesn’t want to play in a Stage Four culture and you do, you have a choice: do it anyway, or give up. Assuming you want to try, then our advice is to be very careful. The Stage Three mind-set is threatened by triads, so it’s important to think through the risks and rewards. If you want to move ahead, then begin triading with the people you need to work with—probably, people at late Stage Three—to accomplish something remarkable. Prove that Stage Four is more effective in terms of its results, and leverage the accomplishment into an invitation to join the emerging group at Stage Four. In short, taking great care to not offend people, triad around the Stage Three individual.

TECHNICAL NOTE: At Stage Four, people assume trust; they don’t earn it. At Stage Three, trust is earned. When lost, it has to be re-earned. At Stage Four, we observed a different phenomenon: people granted trust from the beginning.

First, know the values and current projects of every person in your network.

Second, use what former LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman describes as “the theory of small gifts.”

Third, be great at something, world-class if possible.

Finally, there was a point in our research at which we believed that if people at Stage Three were to triad, they would automatically grow into Stage Four. We were wrong. Unless someone has had the epiphany of Tribal Leadership, triading looks like thinly veiled self-promotion. Effective triading requires a word that we heard people use again and again to describe real Tribal Leaders: “authenticity.”

As a very generous estimate, strategies fail 70 percent of the time, according to a 1999 study by Martin Corby and Diarmuid O’Corrbui. The problem doesn’t play favorites; very few companies manage to sustain high strategic performance over time.

The history of successful tribes is the history of leaders learning to take the right things into account—which is what successful military generals do. One might say that the history of tribes gives us a compelling history of strategy. This tribal wisdom on strategy has been lost, and the result is lots of bright, ambitious people putting it all on the line, and failing when they don’t have to.

we came to the model in Figure 1, which has five parts: values, noble cause, outcomes, assets, and behaviors. The best practice is to go from values to outcomes, then proceed counterclockwise around the circle, asking the three test questions along the way. FIGURE 1: THE TRIBAL LEADERSHIP STRATEGY MAP. START WITH CORE VALUES AND NOBLE CAUSE IN THE CENTER, THEN MOVE TO OUTCOMES AND GO COUNTERCLOCKWISE AROUND THE MODEL.

COACHING TIP: Point to the tangible benefits of shared values and a noble cause.

The key to identifying these first two aspects of strategy is for the Tribal Leader to engage others in a questioning process about what the tribe stands for (values) and what it lives for (noble cause).

Once values and a noble cause are set, tribal strategy involves three conversations. The first is “what we want,” or outcomes. The second is “what we have,” or assets. The third is “what we will do,” or behaviors.

An outcome is different from a goal in one important way.

A goal is off in the future, so, to some people, it implies a failure in the present.

An outcome, by contrast, is a present state of success that morphs into an even bigger victory over time. The difference is the contrast between “I hope we make it—it’ll be great when we turn this around” (setting a goal) and “we have already succeeded, and this is how it looks at this point in the process” (succeeding now with an outcome).

The objective is for the tribe (not just the leader) to set outcomes so compelling that people will want to form and maintain a Stage Four culture to accomplish them. A strong outcome will inspire the best in people and raise the dialogue above tribal politics.

A hallmark of Stage Two is the avoidance of ever being on the hook for anything, so people at this level will often suggest outcomes like “increase quality.” Again and again, we saw Tribal Leaders pushing back: outcomes must be measurable, with a deadline. “How much, and by when?”

In the eighteenth century, delegates at the Continental Congress said that George Washington was the quietest man in the room and the best listener.

After identifying values and setting preliminary outcomes, the tribe should turn to identifying assets in a conversation focused on “What do we have?” An asset is anything the tribe and its people have right now, and it includes equipment, technology, land, relationships, goodwill, brand, public awareness, reputation, culture, and drive. The classic blunder in identification is considering only physical assets but ignoring people’s education, passions, and interpersonal networks.

We suggest that Tribal Leaders ask the question, “What do we have a knack for doing better than anyone else?” This question will often reveal core assets.

COACHING TIP: Ask outsiders what your tribe’s core assets are. Since core assets, almost by definition, are hard to see, outsiders can often see them more easily.

The second special type of asset, almost always ignored, is critical to strategic success: “common ground.” It answers the question, “How are we seen by those with whom we want to transact?”

The first question is whether the tribe has enough assets to accomplish the outcomes. There is nothing wrong with answering “no,” as long as the tribe then deals with the consequences; in fact, the answer is “no” for most corporate strategies in the first round of planning meetings.

Our model encompasses ten thousand years of tribal wisdom that says it’s not smart to proceed as if things will go as planned. As Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke said, “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” If all limitations are not taken into account (stopping the action and confronting the problem), eventual failure becomes likely.

In the event the answer to this first test question is a “no,” the strategic discussion changes to “How do we build our assets?”