Last week, I saw a number of excellent presentations at the Agile 2016 conference in Atlanta. The closing keynote by Carrie Kish focused on tribal leadership.
I’ve seen many of these ideas before in different forms but the session on tribal leadership and the book put this together in some interesting ways.
Here are the basic principles—and a few learnings.
A tribe is a group between 20 and 150 people. You can think of a tribe as a small town. Or as some of the groups in a small town: the churches, the school, the Kiwanis club, the newly married couples with small children. You can also think of businesses and corporations as tribes.
Through their research, David Logan and the folks at CultureSync identified five stages of tribes. These stages are characterized by how their members talk about themselves:
- “Life sucks”
- “My life sucks”
- “I’m great (and you’re not)”
- “We’re great”
- “Life is great”
In short, Carrie Kish argues that organizations want to be at the 4.5 stage. They want to be at the stage of “We’re great” while being capable of doing some of the amazing things of stage 5, “Life is great.” We might think that we want to get to stage 5, but Carrie talks about how stage 5 tends to be unstable.
At this high performance stage, here are some of the benefits if your group happens to be a business:
How to recognize tribal cultures
This comes down to the language. Listen to how people talk.
Are they saying that everything sucks? Or are they saying that only their situation sucks? The difference between stage 1 and stage 2 is subtle. Fortunately, since civilization happened, there are very few stage 1 tribes. In first world countries, these tribes tend to be criminal organizations or gangs.
There are many stage 2 tribes, however. You’ll often hear people in these tribes talk about how their job sucks and if they just had a better boss things would be better. Not everything sucks. But their life sucks. Stage 2 is Dilbert.
Stage 3 tribes are often groups of professionals—doctors, lawyers, architects, stock brokers, etc. You can tell someone from one of these groups because they’ll tend to say, “I’m great, but you’re not.” These are the cultures of individuals. Stage 4 tribes look like teams. Or families. They talk about doing great things together and making sure everyone succeeds in order for the mission, whatever that may be, to succeed.
I’m not going to talk about stage 5 tribes because they tend to be unstable, but you can listen to David Logan, author of Tribal Leadership, talk about identifying the different stages here:
Can tribes change?
The answer is yes. But according to Kish and Logan, they have to move progressively through stages. You can’t jump a stage 2 tribe to a stage 4 tribe. You have to first take them through stage 3. This was one of the things I found most interesting about their presentation (that also fits in with my experience).
If you try to talk to someone in stage 2 using stage 4 language, you will sound like you come from another planet.
Here’s the second key takeaway: Effecting change begins with changing the language.
Here’s an example: One of the traits of a stage 2 culture is complaining. People will sit around talking about how their situation, in particular, sucks and how this tends to be the fault of their boss or some nameless corporate entity. What people say reflects the powerlessness they feel.
Most people tend to not be trained in how to advance stage 2 culture, so what tends to happen is micromanagement. Leaders implement rules to try to “manage” people.
Stage 2 culture can look like this: “I’ll tell you why my life sucks,” and then you’ll have to do the same. One of the interesting experiments they’ve run in sessions is starting a bitchfest where the leader of the session starts by saying, “My life sucks because I have to be here with you.”
What always follows is someone retaliating with how their life sucks. Then the whole room devolves into how their life sucks. Everyone laughs as the comments come faster and faster. The authors claim they’ve never found a workshop where this hasn’t happened.
One negative comment follows another and conspiracy theories often form.
How to change from stage 2 to stage 3
The first step is, don’t participate in the culture of complaining. The other thing that doesn’t work is denying the conspiracies. Denial of the conspiracy only becomes proof of the vastness of the cover-up. A better approach is to upgrade the culture.
In an organization, one of the tips for upgrading the culture is to work one on one with people rather than addressing culture-wide concerns. In this manner, you can avoid the group griping that tends to come from the tribe and get to real concerns.
In terms of politics, I think one of the best things we can do is not participate in the griping and complaining.
Does this mean we don’t talk to members of other political tribes? No. Just don’t get caught up in the complaining. Don’t call people stupid. There’s no sense in calling people stupid. And it doesn’t do much good telling people what they believe is a conspiracy.
Instead, work to create relationships with people based on some of the things you have in common. Find strengths that they have and give them credit. Or, at the very least don’t engage and instead focus your energy on positive action.
The other thing that is crucial is that it’s important to speak the language of stage 3 to folks who are at stage 2. Talk about some successes you’ve had as an individual. Ask them about their successes. Often, people will have had experience in both stages and you can help upgrade them to stage 3 if you just talk about it. One of the tips from tribal leadership is to pair someone from stage 2 with someone from stage 3 as a mentor. You can act as this mentor or, if you know someone they trust from stage 3, help them strengthen the relationship. What’s important to remember is that if you talk stage 4 to someone who is at stage 2, you’re not likely to make a connection.
And always remember, the goal in your individual conversations is to win people over, not win an argument. We want people to fight with us, or at the very least, not fight against us.
David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy (ebook now available).