Leveraging Organizational Tribes
Within every company there are tribes -- groups more powerful than teams or even the CEO -- that are responsible for an organization's success or failure. Vibrant tribes can pull in the best talent, create effective strategies and result in improved performance.
By Dave Logan
For the past 10 years, my colleagues and I asked a single question: "Why do some leaders seem to do everything wrong, and yet succeed?"
Imagine if we, as HR executives, could design workplaces so vibrant that people make up for poor leadership. The same groups would amplify the impact of great leadership.
Great workplaces give companies everything HR executives want: corporate success, job satisfaction, pride in what people do, innovation, retention and recruitment, even conflict resolution that happens on the fly.
Great workplaces are the HR Holy Grail.
For past 10 years, we have observed more than 24,000 employed people, mostly in the United States. We watched most of them interacting in meetings, carefully listening for specific words they used to describe their work, each other and their companies. We also studied the structure of their relationships -- who was connected to whom, and on what basis (small talk, information exchange or values). A disproportionate number of the people we studied are college educated, earning above the median income, and serving as knowledge workers. After all this work, we believe we have some answers.
We published them this year in Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization (HarperCollins, 2008 by Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright).
What we haven't written until now is what all of this research implies for HR: a powerful new role that would be the most important in an organization. We call it the "Tribal Architect." This role has four components:
1. Discover Your Corporate Tribes. The biggest determiner of success isn't the leader, but the naturally occurring social group, which we call the "tribe." A tribe is bigger than a team, smaller than a company and doesn't correspond to an organization chart.
Tribes are different than informal networks because they include people who may not be employees -- such as contractors, consultants and temps. In start-up ventures, tribes include people who may not get paid at all: funders, advisers, even friends and spouses.
In one company we studied, CB Richard Ellis, most tribes formed around sales professionals. A typical tribe would include several brokers, key clients, marketing support personnel and company management.
We also recently observed Zappos, the online clothing company. There, some tribes formed around common roles (such as people in the merchandising group) and others, based on common interests (such as rock climbing).
Tribes -- clusters of between 20 and 150 people -- determine whether leaders succeed, whether strategies are implemented, even whether a company hits its financial targets. Humans have always "tribed." It's part of how we survived the Ice Age. Isn't it time we built organizations around how people naturally organize? Tribal Leadership suggests that HR should build companies from the tribe up.
The fist step, then, is for HR to see who is in what tribe. Who talks to whom? What are the networks that already exist? These are your tribes, and they are the basic building blocks of an organization, not the people designated as managers. Step one: Find your tribes!
2. Rate Each Tribe on a 1 - 5 Scale. Tribes come in five flavors, marked by differences in talk and behavior. Our analogy is that each tribe is on a conveyor belt that moves from one stage to the next. More often than not, the belt sticks, and tribes get stuck.
The Tribal Architect unsticks the conveyor belt so that tribes glide to the next stage. The later stages contain everything HR executives want: higher productivity, less stress and a magnetism that attracts and retains talent. The earlier stages are marked by HR nightmares: harassing behavior, threats, even workplace violence.
For each of your tribes, see which of the following descriptions is the best fit:
Stage One runs the show in criminal tribes, such as gangs and prisons, where the theme is "life sucks," and people act out in despairingly hostile ways. This stage shows up in 2 percent of corporate tribes, but HR needs to be on guard for it, as this is the zone of criminal behavior and workplace violence.
Stage Two, the dominant culture in 25 percent of workplace tribes, says, in effect, "my life sucks," and the mood is a cluster of apathetic victims. People in this stage are passively antagonistic, crossing their arms in judgment yet never getting interested enough to spark any passion.
If you want to see Stage Two in action, go get your drivers' license renewed. Or get your carry-on luggage screened at many airports in the United States. While generalizing is dangerous, our observation is that workers in such places spend a lot of time gossiping and taking actions that don't serve the organizations (or the taxpayer).
In Stage Three, the dominant culture in almost half of U.S. workplace tribes. The theme is, "I'm great" or, more fully, "I'm great, and you're not." In this culture, knowledge is power, and so people hoard it, from client contacts to gossip.
People at this stage have to win, and winning is personal. They'll out-work, out-think and out-maneuver their competitors. The mood that results is a collection of "lone warriors," demanding support and being disappointed that others don't have their ambition or skill.
Stage Three runs the show in most hospitals, universities, sales groups, dental practices and most professional practices (accounting, consulting, architecture or law). The more knowledge is king, the more likely the culture is to be Stage Three.
Stage Four -- representing 22 percent of tribal cultures -- is where the theme is "we're great" and another group isn't. Stage Four is the zone of Tribal Leadership, where members embrace one of their own as their leader. The leaders transform individual contributors into tribal members. The tribes and their leaders focus people on their aspirations, and define measurable ways to turn their values into initiatives.
Stage Four dominates many high-tech companies, where projects are too complex to be handled by one person, no matter how bright. Again and again, groups that moved from Stage Three to Four saw their productivity, innovation and sales soar.
Stage Five is the culture of 2 percent of the workforce tribes, where the theme is "life is great" and focuses on realizing potential by making history. Teams at Stage Five have produced miraculous innovations. The team that produced the first Macintosh was Stage Five, and we've seen this mood at biotechnology company Amgen. This stage is pure leadership, vision and inspiration.
The head of the Gallup Organization, Jim Clifton, told us about a Stage Five project: the first world poll. Once Gallup dominated the field (and became the top company in its industry by stabilizing at Stage Four), the challenge was how to change the world. They used their resources (including Nobel laureates) to sample more than 95 percent of the world's population. For the first time, the world can speak with one voice. Truly a global initiative!
3. Create Tribal Leaders. Just as an architect relies on others to pour the concrete and erect skyscrapers, Tribal Architects rely on leaders within the tribes to do the work. Tribal Leader candidates are people who are highly connected within the tribe, and who generally speak the language one stage beyond most of the others in the tribe.
In almost every case we examined, a person whispered in the ear of the leader, coaching them how to move their tribe to the next stage. This person, we argue, should be the HR leader.
4. Coach the Leaders to Nudge the Tribe to the Next Stage. Each tribal stage has a set of leverage points that will advance it to the next stage. If leaders use the wrong leverage points, they will hold the tribe where it is, or perhaps even move it backwards.
Here are a few steps that HR professionals should encourage leaders to take:
For Stage One: The leader gets individual members out of the tribe and into another.
For Stage Two: The leader finds those individuals who want things to be different, and mentors them -- one at a time. The leader says that the person has potential. Over time, some will start to talk the Stage Three language. At that point, the leader encourages them to mentor another member of the tribe.
For Stage Three: The leader identifies people's individual values, and notices which cut across the tribe. Point out the values that unite people, and then construct initiatives that bring these values to life.
For Stage Four: The leader asks the question, "How we can we make a global impact?" With the leader as the catalyst, the tribe's focus shifts from outperforming another tribe to making history.
A full listing of the leverage points are available in Appendix A ("A Tribal Leader's Cheat Sheet") of Tribal Leadership.
In light of this research, the most important role for in any company is to work through leaders to build vibrant tribes. At that point, companies pull in the best talent, create their own strategies, and seek changes that will improve performance. Leadership becomes effortless. HR executives, we believe, should be the architects of this management revolution.
Dave Logan, Ph.D., co-author of Tribal Leadership, is a senior partner of CultureSync, a management-consulting firm that focuses on creating great workplaces. CultureSync's clients include American Express, Intel, and Charles Schwab. Dave is also on the faculty of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California and is a former associate dean of executive education. Tribal Leadership is available from
Amazon
among other places. Readers can contact the author at logan@culturesync.net.
A free audio version of Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization is available at Zappos.com:
http://www.zappos.com/tribal.zhtml
.
September 1, 2008 Copyright 2008© LRP Publications
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